A technical Interview with Matthew Reynolds, author of Beginning E-Commerce with Visual Basic, ASP, SQL Server 7.0 and MTS

Matthew Reynolds is a developer, architect and evangelist of Web-based applications running on Microsoft Internet technologies. He is also Senior Editor for ASPWatch.com.

How did you come to find yourself writing a book for Wrox?

It’s always been something I wanted to do!  The timing was lucky, though.  I’d just left my old job to set-up my own Internet startup so while my new business was getting up to speed I had the time to realize that ambition.  I’d contributed some work to a couple of other Wrox titles before “Beginning E-commerce” and written for a few Web sites, but this was my first major writing project.

In this book you create two object libraries, WroxCommerce and WroxProcessor, what are the main features?

“WroxCommerce” is used to drive the cart and catalog activities of the store, effectively it’s all the bits and pieces that lets the customer see what’s for sale, put things in the shopping cart and order whatever he or she wants to buy.  WroxCommerce also handles the management of customer information, recommendations and suggestions and a lot of the cool toys that we build into the components as we work through the book.

“WroxProcessor” controls what happens to the order after the order has been placed in the system.  It’s the implementation of what’s called an “order processing pipeline” – it takes the order and passes it between all the interested parties, such as suppliers, warehouse staff, accounts, and so on.