The primary design goals of the framework are flexibility and security. Most merchant systems will make assumptions about the structure of your catalog data and your customer data, or about how your order process works. Most also impose severe restrictions on how the programmer will interface with your electronic catalog. These are precisely the kinds of constraints that Apache::iNcom is designed to avoid.

Apache::iNcom provides the following infrastructure:

• Session management

• Cart management

• Input validation

• Order management

• User management

• Easy database access

• Internationalization

• Error handling

Most of the base functionality of Apache::iNcom is realized by using standard well-known modules such as DBI for generic SQL database access, HTML::Embperl for dynamic page generation, Apache::Session for session management, mod_perl for Apache integration, and Locale::Maketext for localization.

Here are its assumptions:

• Data is held in a SQL database that supports transactions.

• The user interface is presented using HTML.

• Sessions are managed through cookies.

Available from CPAN. See the module manpage for more information.