System Administrator's Guide Zelerate: AllCommerce
Installing Necessary Software
You need to ensure that you have the following software installed first:
  • Perl 5.005 or higher
  • A database from the list below for which you can find a database driver.
  • Database drivers (i.e., DBD & DBI)
  • A Web server (e.g., Apache)
  • libwww-perl (optional, required for cookieless shopping)
All of these prerequisites are readily available for the Linux operating system. Other operating environments, such as Unix, Solaris, FreeBSD, and Windows 2000, are also supported.

If you have not installed all of the prerequisites that are needed for AllCommerce we strongly advise that you install these prerequisites before continuing on with the installation procedure.

Perl
AllCommerce requires that you have Perl installed and working properly. You can find out if you have Perl installed by entering perl -v from a shell prompt. If you have Perl installed, this command will return a response like:
               This is perl, version 5.005_03 built for i386-linux
               Copyright 1987-1999, Larry Wall
               ...
            
The version number should be of the form "5.005_xx" or "5.x.y". If you do not receive this response, or if your Perl version is not at the supported version, you will have to install (or update) Perl before continuing with this installation.

Databases
AllCommerce requires an installed database management system. Currently, it has built-in support for MySQL. We recommend Informix, mSQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL.

Attention! Support for these databases is currently experimental and is not stable in this release. Check http://www.zelerate.org/ for updates.

Database Drivers (DBI and DBD)
Perl will need DBI and DBD drivers in order to communicate with your selected database.

DBI is a database interface API for Perl. It allows AllCommerce to smoothly connect to a database. DBI defines an API, but it omits the implementation-dependent details for the specific database. DBD Drivers are written to bridge the gap, implementing the API for a specific independent database.

The DBI alone is not sufficient, as it is merely an interface between your Perl code and a specific database driver. Therefore, the DBI Driver needs a functional DBD Driver to communicate with the database.

A Web Server
AllCommerce requires that you have a Web server installed and working properly before installing it.

At this time AllCommerce is optimized to only run with the Apache Web server. However, there is a ported version of AllCommerce available which runs under the Microsoft IIS server. In future releases of AllCommerce the ported functionality for IIS will be included in the standard release.

Wrapper Interface for Cookieless Shopping
AllCommerce can provide cookieless browsing, using the "wrapper" interface. The wrapper interface is dependent on the libwww library for Perl. See Appendix E: Implementing Cookieless Shopping in the Zelerate AllCommerce User's Guide for more information. This step is optional; however, if you are using the wrapper interface, you need to ensure that libwww-perl is working properly.

Ensure that the following packages are installed:
Digest::MD5
HTML::Parser
MIME::Base64
URI

You can obtain these packages from www.linpro.no/lwp or http://www.cpan.org/.
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