Hello Sarah,

> Is it because Ruby a) can't handle such application, b) not ready for 
> that type of apps because of performance and/or security, c) too hard
> to implement(perhaps PHP is better for this type of apps), d) no one
> is willing to share the scripts , e) or any that I can't think of.

I somehow do get the feeling that you have been biased negativly towards
Ruby by something that happend to you. Is it the lack of documentation
in some parts ? Or the lack of support ? 

Ruby is in some ways more of a 'real language' than PHP, where support
for a lot of common tasks is compiled in the language. Ruby must include
these in the form of libraries, and that in turn implies some
difficulties when installing, although projects like RPA and rubygems do
facilitate that process enormously. 

More to the subject, I believe such an application does not exist
because it is too easy to build your own version of it. Integrating a
third party shopping cart with a Rails application is probably bound to
be more difficult than just coding it up yourself. A shopping cart has
many dependencies to the web application framework and thus it is not
completely trivial to program a framework-less version of a shopping
cart  as the first post asks for. 

I would need to see a few (html) screenshots of such an application to
completely understand what is asked for here. 

yours, 
kaspar

hand manufactured code - www.tua.ch/ruby