Affiliate Marketing

i) Affiliate Marketing is a revenue sharing venture between a website owner and an online merchant.

ii) The website owner will place advertisements on his website to either help sell the merchant’s products or to send potential customers to the merchant’s website, all in exchange for a share of the profits.

 There are three types affiliate marketing

 • Pay Per Click — Every time a potential customer leaves the affiliate website by “clicking” on the link leading to the merchant’s website, a certain amount of money is deposited in the affiliate’s account. This amount can be pennies or dollars depending on the product and amount of the commission.

 • Pay Per Sale — Every time a sale is made as a result of advertising on the affiliate’s website, a percentage, or commission, is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

 • Pay Per Lead — Every time a potential client registers at the merchant’s website as a result of the advertisement on the affiliate’s account, a previously determined amount is deposited into the affiliate’s account.

Action Script 3.0 – Next Generation Flash Development

Action Script is an object oriented programming language for the Adobe Flash Player run-time environment. It enables interactivity, data handling, and much more in Flash content and applications.

ActionScript is executed by the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM), which is built in to the Flash Player. ActionScript code is typically compiled into bytecode format (a sort of programming language that’s written and understood by computers) by a compiler, such as the one built into Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. The bytecode is embedded in SWF files, which are executed by the Flash Player, the run-time environment.

ActionScript 3.0 offers a robust programming model that is familiar to developers with a basic knowledge of object-oriented programming. Some of the key features of ActionScript 3.0 include the following:

• A new ActionScript Virtual Machine, called AVM2, that uses a new bytecode instruction set and provides significant performance improvements
• A more modern compiler code base that adheres much more closely to the ECMAScript (ECMA 262) standard and performs deeper optimizations than previous versions of the compiler
• An expanded and improved application programming interface (API), with low-level control of objects and a true object-oriented model
• A core language based on the upcoming ECMAScript (ECMA-262) edition 4 draft language specification
• An XML API based on the ECMAScript for XML (E4X) specification (ECMA-357 edition 2). E4X is a language extension to ECMAScript that adds XML as a native data type of the language.
• An event model based on the Document Object Model (DOM) Level 3 Events Specification

Advantages of ActionScript 3.0

• It is designed to facilitate the creation of highly complex applications with large data sets and object-oriented, reusable code bases.
• While ActionScript 3.0 is not required for content that runs in Adobe Flash Player 9, it opens the door to performance improvements that are only available with the AVM2, the new virtual machine.
• ActionScript 3.0 code can execute up to ten times faster than legacy ActionScript code.

DCKAP at WEB 2.0 EXPO published in O’REILLY Event Guide

DCKAP Technologies, We Do IT Right! We had participated in the WEB 2.0 EXPO on March 31- April 3, 2009 at SAN FRANCISCO,CA . Many top companies had participated along with which DCKAP too participated and it has been published in the book “O’REILLY tech web, Event Guide.

Magento eCommerce – Journey over the years

Introduction:

Considered to be one of the most powerful eCommerce based CMS tool today, the journey hasn’t been a smooth sailing. The content below throws light on the path taken by Magento over the years to reach where it is today.

For years people had been using a modified Zen Cart codebase which worked well, something that was easily hackable but constantly frustrated web administrators with bad system design, poor templates, low standards compliance and a weak development community. It was something people had to live with and overcame these shortfalls by making few custom modifications. Magento appeared on the scene at a time when everyone was criticizing over Web 2.0. It was a time of shiny new applications, short & brandable urls, gradients and buttons. At first it seemed too good to be true; an MVC approach (using Zend framework), latest technology, well thought out features, upgrading platform, company backed and developers not afraid to use the latest versions of PHP and MySQL. Those who tried Magento loved its features but not much was known about it’s codebase. It was really strange, it had a lot of files, a lot of directories, a completely OOP and an unusual use for XML. Those who tried this took it as a learning experience and went about using it in small real time projects to see its results. Even though a lot of this depends on several external factors like people who use it, application and its purpose, and so on it was more about ensuring the right technology is used at the right place.

Features:

With features such as product filtering, high numbers of orders, one page checkout and many such add-ons, a lot was required in terms of hacking into Zen Cart, so due to its advanced features people started using Magento. But there was one hurdle which most web developers faced. People could not understand what decision process resulted in thousands of directories and tens of thousands of files (a lot of which contain empty class declarations). Figuring out the pattern of where the code went and what the abstract folders called “Convert”, “Entity”, “Layer”, “Resource” etc. are for. The naming convention for folder names, model names etc. didn’t sink in – sometimes you needed lower case, sometimes camel case and sometimes one capital letter. To make things worse, documentation was very sketchy and not many resources were available to find out answer for the problems. Due to the Zend/OOP/MVC influence on Magento it was impossible to follow the code. Classes are referenced dynamically, various aspects are contained in XML files and there is no clear flow that you can just debug through. The sheer volume of files and folders makes finding something unbelievably tedious. Even the database is a minefield. In Magento, the use of EAV means that data is split amongst hundreds of abstract tables. Again, it doesn’t flow and it doesn’t make sense without a great deal of time developing a solid understanding of what they have done.

Hence to conclude, Magento is an advanced system which requires a lot of learning and re-learning. Once the rules are learnt and understood these application design decisions make sense.