Beginning E-Commerce Part 6 - Interfaces in the WroxCommerce Project

As we indicated previously, when we create an ActiveX object in Visual Basic, VB does all the hard work of putting the correct interfaces in place so that it can plug itself into Active Scripting, and by association, ASP, Windows Script Host, or anything else that acts as an ActiveX component container. Additionally, VB also creates an interface that just contains the methods and properties that are public on that object. This allows VB to call into that object highly efficiently.

Beginning E-Commerce Part 5 - Compiling the File

Although we won't talk about registering components and deployment to production servers at this point in time, it is perhaps worth mentioning a useful naming convention associated with versioning. One of the worst gotchas a typical developer goes through when they deploy components to a remote site is when the set of business objects put up there doesn't work as planned and the site is broken. If it's a production site that's being deployed to (and it usually is), the site must be reset to its previous state as quickly as possible.

Beginning E-Commerce Part 4 - Versioning

When we make the site available to visitors we'll deploy (copy across the ASP code and ActiveX components) the application to a Web server at a remote location. At this point one of the things that can cause a lot of hassle is not knowing for certain whether the software components we're running are the correct ones.

Beginning E-Commerce Part 3 - Connecting to the Databases

Our chosen technology for connecting to our database is going to be ActiveX Data Objects, or ADO. ADO is a set of objects that can connect to any ODBC or OLE DB database. To further my earlier point about object models, ADO is arranged into an object model (we're not going to go into the model in detail here as it's a big subject – if you want to know more, try looking at ADO 2.1 Programmer's Reference ISBN 1861002688 also by Wrox Press). In this case, the root object is typically the Connection object.

Beginning E-Commerce Part 2 - Starting the WroxCommerce Project

As we start our project the first thing we're going to look at is creating the root object of our model - the Visit object - and adding some basic configuration code to the Visit class module we build. We'll then move on to deal with the Database object via the Database class module.

Beginning E-Commerce Part 1 - Object Oriented Programming

Most modern software can be controlled programmatically through its exposed object models. In fact, most of the applications you use everyday on your Windows PC have an object model, including Microsoft Word, Excel, and Internet Explorer.