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I looked around and found two for this e-commerce application comparison: PrestaShop and Drupal Commerce.

Actually, there’s another good one: UberCart, which is an e-commerce module for Drupal 6. But since Drupal Commerce is the evolution of UberCart, it seems there’s no reason to go with Drupal 6 and UberCart if you’re starting a new site. You might as well pair Drupal 7 with Drupal Commerce.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is an open-source e-commerce application based on PHP.

Plus points for PrestaShop:

• More popular than Drupal Commerce (1472 Alexa rank vs. 76968 for Drupal Commerce)
• 90,000 shops use it
• 256,000 community members
• Seems easier to use and get going
• 256 major features

Possible cons for PrestaShop:

• Runs on MySQL only. Drupal and Drupal Commerce also support PostgreSQL
• Based out of France. I don’t think that should be too much of a problem, though. European payment methods are supported, but then so art the major American ones (Authorize.net and PayPal)

Drupal Commerce

Drupal Commerce is implemented as a series of modules for Drupal. There’s also an installation profile to allow you to easily install it along with the Drupal base.

Pros for Drupal Commerce:

• Based on Drupal. You get hundreds of Drupal modules that you can integrate to get great general content management and website functionality.
• While the PrestaShop site is more popular than Drupal Commerce’s, Drupal is much more popular at Alexa rank 396 than PrestaShop. You won’t be alone while using Drupal.
• Drupal Commerce is based on Drupal 7, a highly modular and modern CMS base. I know this seems repetitive, but 7 is a big plus for Drupal Commerce because of the flexibility it offers.

Negatives for Drupal Commerce:

• I think Drupal Commerce has less commerce-related modules (such as for payment) than PrestaShop. Many of those are still under development.

Summary

All in all, I think Drupal Commerce has the potential to be a great e-commerce environment combined with the general content management power of Drupal. If you’re looking for something easy and specifically already oriented toward e-commerce, PrestaShop might be better.

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Magento is a feature-packed e-commerce system/shopping cart. Unfortunately, it’s also overengineered. It needs to do a ton of queries every time you so much as look at it, leading to the idea of some that “magento sucks“.

Combine that with the already widespread impression that “ebay sucks” , and you seem to have a recipe for either disaster, evil, or worldwide domination, depending on your perspective.

There’s already a feeling (perhaps unfair) that Magento has gotten to the point where it’s more oriented toward companies paying thousands of dollars a year for support. So what will smaller startups look to now for their e-commerce needs?

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http://symfony.com/doc/2.0/book/from_flat_php_to_symfony2.html

1. Facebook Announces a Better, Faster PHP: HipHop PHP
2. Drupal Symfony2 Integration
3. Drupal Symfony2 Integration

Now Facebook, which also runs on PHP, has announced a new version of PHP that runs twice as fast.

This also means that if you have a popular WordPress blog, you might only have to have half the server size you use now.

How PHP Works

PHP, in its usual incarnation, is an interpreted language. This means that a program (such as a PHP module in the Apache webserver) reads the PHP instructions in your script and executes them in turn. Every time the PHP script is executed, it has to be turned into machine code, even if the script runs 1000 times per hour. Obviously, this is inefficient, but people put up with it because PHP is considered easier to develop in than other languages.

By comparison, C++ is a language which is usually compiled (changed to machine instructions which run directly on the CPU). This happens only once, and every time the program runs, it runs directly on the processor. Because there’s no intermediate interpretation step, C++ programs run much faster.

Facebook’s HipHop PHP

Facebook announced what they are calling HipHop PHP, which translates PHP into C++. Then you use g++, the GNU C++ compiler, to compile the C++ program.

Here’s how the process works:

HipHop PHP Transformation Process

Facebook says compilation of their PHP code results in savings of 50% in server usage.

They also released HPHPi, which is an optimized PHP interpreter that doesn’t require you re-compile your code.

Download HipHop PHP

Facebook is going to release the code to HPHP under the PHP license on Github for download at this address (but it’s not there yet).

Caveats

In order to optimize PHP to the maximum, they left out some rarely used dynamic functionality, such as the eval() function.

I’ll report more on HipHop PHP as Facebook releases more information.

Resources

Facebook HipHop PHP announcement

HipHop release video

Facebook HipHop developer mailing list

ZDNet article

HipHop for PHP: Who Benefits?

BestTechie article

Feed2Meme article

Facebook’s HipHop Goes Public With a New PHP Runtime

PHPC: A PHP Compiler

Roadsend PHP compiler

An interview with a Facebook employee about PHP

PHP Facebook release

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It also uses C++ and Java in places, but it’s the fact that it uses the little scripting language that could (PHP) is what is interesting. Aditya Agarwal of Facebook describes how the social networking giant does it in a presentation at QCon SF 2008.

The story is being discussed on Slashdot here.

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