Spree Commerce Blog

As a user of Docker, I'm excited. But as someone who uses the dotCloud PaaS right now to run a company, I'm a little annoyed, mostly at myself for not seeing this coming.

Clearly there's a diversion of resources away from the dotCloud PaaS to Docker, and that's going to have a toll somewhere. Despite the company's reassurances that everything is business as usual, I know that Docker [the project] is just too much of a beast and eventually the Docker [the company] will need to move on from the PaaS. (I should know, since I gave a talk about how "Docker is the future" just a few weeks after Docker was announced.) [0]

I'm not really sure what my choices are now, either; DigitalOcean, I guess? I don't want to manage servers myself, and I want to be able to pay on the memory-usage axis for my app instances (which Heroku doesn't allow). I wasn't super excited by DO last year, but maybe things have changed.

My current "light at the end of the tunnel" is hoping that the Docker-based PaaS ecosystem matures, but for now none of them seem like they're mature enough, and it's tough to keep up with all of them since it seems like another one pops up each week.

Here's my wishlist:

-- (1) command-line client for deployment via git repository and doing anything related to deployment (add new instances, remove instances, create new environments, assign domains to the PaaS router, etc.)

-- (2) clear pricing

-- (3) I can pay for more memory as I need it

-- (4) ability to specify…

The most prevalant rails one is Spree: http://spreecommerce.com

I'm in the opening stages of building a spree site right now, and at this early point it seems really good. The developers are responsive on irc and on the list, and the repo gets regular pushes.

Its a rails3 engine, and makes full use of this and other rails3 features, plus the devs have extensive plans to use the various 3.1 improvements. It's really modular; the spree gem is actually a meta-gem with deps pointing to other gems, 'spree-core', 'spree-auth', 'spree-promo' etc.

You make all your customisations to it in the same way, by decorating the various core classes, following the same pattern as the spree submodules themselves.

Oh and it has shitloads of tests, both rspec and cucumber/capybara.

Basically it seems pretty sweet.

Really love Lemonstand (http://www.lemonstandapp.com). Super well developed and has been easy to customize. Great support. For simple, quick projects, I've used Shopify (hosted) and had a very good experience with it. Their team is very active and constantly adds new features and improvements. Our experience with Magento was a mess - we found it very difficult to work with, and far overkill for what we needed. I've heard good things about Spree (http://www.spreecommerce.com), but haven't used it myself yet.

The semantic information is already in the selector that pops up, e.g. '.headline'. I don't see why they need to store anything elaborate to make that portable. The scope of the change (document, document type, section, site) isn't shown but presumably it defaults to 'type'.

BTW the in-place edit features remind me a lot of this[1] use of Deface[2] in Spree[3]

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjgQHzYcxIQ

[2] https://github.com/railsdog/deface#readme

[3] http://spreecommerce.com/

Not having a demo available is beyond ridiculous. I asked about it in their forums and was told to email sales. I went ahead with the purchase anyway.

It would not take much for them to setup a personal sandbox demo just like spree commerce does ( http://spreecommerce.com/demo )

It can't be that they don't want people to think the product is too complicated before purchase, as their after purchase help docs are limited and they have no personal follow up or checkin.