OldKYCandy.com
Old Kentucky Chocolates, I first wired this site’s eCommerce using Perl CGI and mSQL (not MySQL but mSQL, which was still around at the time) in ~1999-2000 inside an Apache vhosts configs. I had never coded before and was working just out of high school for Web-Point Communications in Rocky Mount, North Carolina at the time. We could see from the browser view source that thankfully they’ve upgraded their server architecture and technology stack-choices quite a bit since then, with an nginx reverse proxy in front of whatever is there now (more like what I’d most-commonly use today if there were an Apache web server in the picture). (And also of course everyone using mSQL started using MySQL later, due to portability, security patches, wider array of Linux cross-platform, and other advantages which to the developers of today are more obvious when it comes to “open source.” In those days, mSQL was still all the rave.) This was the beginning of my career in web development, Old Kentucky Candy at Web-Point Communications. Having an online eCommerce storefront on the web to complement one’s physical brick-and-mortar store was a brand-new concept, and so Kentucky-chocolate was a likely retail product-seller to get on the “www superhighway” for eCommerce in its first years. This was also the first time I used a server-language like Perl CGI furthermore, to both talk to a database in the backend and render the HTML into the web browser on the front. As such, the project proves “full stack” isn’t actually a very new concept. PHP wasn’t really a thing yet, so Perl was the tool of choice as a backend web programming language, and I had my trusty O’Reilly -published printed book (imagine that, a printed book), to refer to, for understanding how to program using the Perl programming language.