Parsing perlmonks reveals that the responses were very helpful (they almost always are) and pointed me in the right direction.
In fact, it alerted me to a security problem. That's the equivalent of trying clothes on in front of a friend and them noticing a hole in it: You get to fix it before you have to cover your ass with it.
I was putting all the prices into the page and making them into returned parameters. (Originally, we had looked at making the price updates happen constantly. It wasn't a terrible idea, but I can't implement something like that, and I suspect that the problems resulting from it would be rather prohibitively numerous.) The idea was that whatever the price was when they *first looked at it* would remain consistent.
Someone pointed out to me that they could just view the source, change parameters, and set their own prices.
That, as they say, would be bad.
So I thought: "Well, that's okay. I'll just confirm the prices against the stock file before they go in the cart. A price check."
Then it occurred to me.
"...but if I'm checking the price, I might as well not have it in the page..."
Wonderful. Cuts down the amount of HTML I have to rely on, cuts down the amount of bizarre extra variables I have to keep track of, and cuts down on necessary matching (previously, it would have matched to each entry in a file and then had to match again; now, it just matches the entry, grabs the value, and moves along.)
Now the fun part: Implementation.
I printed a copy of the code; surprisingly, it's *three pages long*! I hadn't realized it was growing this much.
I'm curious how long it is without comments and blank lines. I'll probably write a one-liner later to rip 'em out and give me a line count.
I'm glad to be updating for a reason, and I'm really glad that I feel like I can work again. Yesterday I was supposed to be working on this and all I did was update my journal and fall asleep a lot.
Doctor's appointment in...two days, I think. Good. It'll be nice to see what the hell my doctor looks like now. Friggin' HMOs.
Quick Addendum: I meant to mention this before, but I noticed someone talking about brainbench either here or at monks (I think it was monks) and investigated it just a bit. Seems like an interesting idea. Wonder if it's something I should try to get rated on or not.
