simpleCart(js) is a lightweight (10.5 kb) & free shopping cart application for creating a simple yet good looking e-commerce environment in minutes.

It uses cookies to store the shopping basket data, no databases required, and payment is completed via PayPal.

The application is modular with the JavaScript functions included.

An "add to basket" example:

simpleCart.add('name=Shirt','price=6.00','image=images/myImage.png'
,'quantity=5','size=XL','color=Blue');

The download package already includes the source of the demo.

Most of the developers use cookies for storing data on the client side as they are cross browser & platform. But storing important data in cookies has some downsides:

• Size: Cookie max size is around 4kb.
• Bandwidth: Cookies are used in every HTTP transaction.
• Complexity: It is hard to manipulate cookies correctly.

Modern web browsers, Google & Flash have non-cookie storage solutions but each of them solved this differently:

• globalStorage: Firefox 2.0+, Internet Explorer 8
• localStorage: development WebKit
• openDatabase: Safari 3.1+
• userdata behavior: Internet Explorer 5.5+
• Adobe Flash
• Google Gears

PersistJS solves all of the issues above. It currently supports persistent client-side storage through the following backends:

• flash: Flash 8 persistent storage.
• gears: Google Gears-based persistent storage.
• localstorage: HTML5 draft storage.
• whatwg_db: HTML5 draft database storage.
• globalstorage: HTML5 draft storage (old spec).
• ie: Internet Explorer userdata behaviors.
• cookie: Cookie-based persistent storage.

And the great news is, each backend is communicated with the same interface which means you don’t have to know or care which backend is being used.