"Many Open-source developers write code to solve problems and add features that interest them. With commercial projects, developers have vested interests in providing applications that comply with their client's requirements. So Open-Source projects are continually developing, are reliable and modular with great looking pages, but their commercial counterparts tend to be more stable and feature-rich, and are documented.
Windows developers now have an alternatitve to MS Access. A great Web development platform is Apache, MySQL and PHP, available on both Linux and Windows. Web support for LAMP and WAMP is very good, and when compared to the Microsoft alternative for smaller businesses, MySQL blows MS Access out of the ballpark!
This review compares Open-Source and commercial shopping cards suitable for smaller Web retailers and discusses Web development issues. Included is a separate E-Commerce Merchant Guide for retailers who need an affordable shopping cart with credit card payments that can be customized for their business.
The Shopping Carts reviewed can be installed and easily configured, without programming. However, if you have plans to customize an on-line shop and expand it to provide you and your customers with a professional and tailored shop that can grow and adapt to a changing marketplace, including a range of B2C and B2B Web services, you will need the capability to further develop the system."
