Staying on top of web development trends for your benefit
A little over a month ago, Nirav (one of our senior developers) and I attended AspDotNetStorefront’s 2013 Developer Conference in Ashland, Oregon. It was a great opportunity for us to meet and speak with the AspDotNetStorefront team, and it gave us good insight into what might be ‘in store’ for 2014 and beyond.
In this post I would like to share the highlights of the AspDotNetStorefront (ASPDNSF) developers conference.
Dave Methvin on jQuery
Firstly, we were delighted to meet Dave Methvin, President of the jQuery Foundation. Dave gave the keynote presentation on the state of jQuery. One of the things we learned was that jQuery 1.9 and 2.0 are both available for use, however 2.0 only supports modern browsers. So if you still need to deal with IE 6/7/8, then you need to stick to jQuery 1.x. Dave also shared information on browser usage. While Chrome is still ahead, IE’s share grew in 2013. IE 6 usage across the world is below 1 %, with the exception of China where the usage is still at a massive 22%!
Saurabh Pant and Windows Azure
Saurabh Pant covered Windows Azure particularly with regards to how easy it is to use. Xanthos will be exploring Azure as an option in the New Year.
John Morrison on ‘Fearless Code Modification’
John Morrison from Morrison Consulting shared some of his company’s best practices in his presentation “Fearless code modification” as well as in a separate session with me (thank you John!). The advice and feedback we received from him has encouraged us to challenge our own team of developers in order to improve our own efficiency.
Updates on AspDotNetStorefront
So what about AspDotNetStorefront? Apart from the new 9.4 release (which has some worthwhile features both for us as development partners and for our clients), the really exciting news pertains to the dotFeed Cloud platform. While AspDotNetStorefront will continue to provide the core functionality of an online shopping cart, , the integration of the software with dotFeed Cloud, will increase future functionality of the store without requiring you to keep changing the software. Ultimately, it will be extending the power of the Storefront by pulling data from the Storefront, enabling us to apply rules to transform the data and then output the data to other business applications
Some of the current applications of dotFeed
– Google Shopping
– Amazon
– Google Trusted Stores
– Excel
– Bongo
– Sales pages
– Quickbooks
Some of the future applications of dotFeed API
– Feed products from one storefront to another
– Extract orders and inventory
– Send inventory back to the storefront
– Feed products from storefront to Amazon
– Extract orders from Amazon to Storefront
– Feed orders from Amazon market place back to Storefront
– Paypal orders to Quickbooks
– Xero – another accounting package
– Fishbowl – inventory management
– Point of Sale
– FTP
– Facebook shopping tab
– Mailchimp
– Salesforce
Ecommerce websites for the future
The power of DotFeed lies in taking different types of data, transforming the data with rules that you can set, and then outputting the data to different platforms depending on your requirements. It really is about a multi-channel, multi-functionality, joined up approach to ecommerce!
If you are an ecommerce store owner and would like to explore the power of dotFeed for your business, get in touch with Xanthos.
