Persisting a shopping cart in Ruby on Rails

Question

Currently developing a shopping cart, the options for persisting the cart, as i see them are:

1. Store the entire cart object in a sessions table.
2. Store the

Answer 1

Check out the Railscasts episodes #141-#146... Helped me a lot with shopping cart/checkout related stuff (though the episodes don't directly address your question, you will get to see a straightforward method of implementing a shopping cart).

• http://railscasts.com/episodes/141-paypal-basics
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/142-paypal-notifications
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/143-paypal-security
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/144-active-merchant-basics
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/145-integrating-active-merchant
• http://railscasts.com/episodes/146-paypal-express-checkout