Need an expert’s suggestion!

@6digreezMar 10.2011

To all the experts out there…I would love a moment of your time and your advice on the correct platforms to use to build my project.

I haven’t written code in about 14 years, but have hired teams to develop in- house systems for companies I’ve had in the past. These were full time employees who continued evolving the platform. These were NOT web apps…no web development leadership under my belt. I need to dive in very deep, very quickly to the web side and build an awesome the team that will build out our vision and ideas to expand business. The main area I need some direction on right now is getting a handle on the best languages and resources to get our job done so I know I’m hiring the right experts.

We do e-commerce, so building a really dynamic shopping cart with back-end flexibility is huge.

Within that on line store environment, we’ll be building a deep layer of interactivity. Things like: users sharing an on line experience together from different locations,

users being able to create groups of friends who share information that gets stored,

AND the user needs to be able to choose a product they want to purchase, and they need to be able to personalize it by viewing their personalization on the screen as they change it. Imagine you’re ordering a trophy for the mvp of the team you coach and by default, the trophy is displayed on line saying: MVP of the year: Sawyer Mason, 2011. You want to change the text, text size, text font and perhaps align it differently on the trophy. We want our user to be able to do all of this live on line and say YES…this is what I want to buy….send it!

So…to all the experts out there that I appreciate and respect incredibly, what should I be using to build this environment, giving myself the most flexibility for tie ins to social media, mobile apps and future rapid growth and development.

If you respond, I can’t thank you enough and would be happy to do anything I can to reciprocate!

Cheers,
jcm

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Full-stack Developer

4 Comments(s) _↴

@TheBearMayMar 13.2011 — #Just about everything you list can be done in a variety of languages and technologies, so it really becomes a personal choice. Until a few years ago I'd have pointed you to Java, but now you could use ASP.Net (I'd recommend C# if you go that route) or even PHP to accomplish the tasks you've mentioned. Since you mention social media though, you may want to use PHP as the FaceBook API/SDK is implemented most fully in PHP; Twitter APIs are HTTP based so any of the languages mentioned will work; Flickr has APIs for at least 12 different languages including PHP and .Net; and Digg has 4 languages but PHP and .Net are both supported. PHP provides a relatively rich graphics library which could be used for some of the image manipulation it sounds like you intend on doing. Database back end can be anything you want, but if you use the .Net platform I'd go with SQL server; for PHP MySQL is usually the standard, and Java really depends on the platform you implement it on (Linux ->MySQL, Oracle, UDB; Windows ->SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, UDB; AIX->DB2, Oracle) .

@6digreezauthorMar 15.2011 — #for taking the time to answer so thoroughly. That was very kind of you and if we were neighbors, I would insist that happy hour was on me today.

I'm curious if you have one more moment, what your thoughts are on mysql for expandability, speed and handling what could be considered more complex data manipulation (wherever the bar is set for that at this time). Quite some time ago, we were developing all non-web driven applications & my tech guys always told me mysql could never do the job we needed...and so we paid out the wazoo for SQLServer- being at least thrilled I could avoid the expense of Oracle (that was what I learned on...even more years ago). I'm guessing a ton has improved in 9 or so years. So my instinct is to be nervous and cautious, but I would be thrilled to finally be more in the land of low cost and free development tool.

Happy Monday!

jm

@aj_nscMar 15.2011 — #EDIT: 9 years ago? Yeah, okay, MySQL may not have been able to do the job back then...that's true.

If your tech guys said that, someone needs to call them out on it (I nominate you!) MySQL powers wikipedia, youtube, flickr, and lots of extremely high traffic sites. It's not the database engine itself, so much as the architecture that allows the database to handle so much load.

I do know enough to know that architecture of database servers more than the database software allows a database system to scale, however, I have barely any idea about database server architecture, so I'd love someone to jump in here right now and finish this answer off.

http://dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysqluc-2007.html

@TheBearMayMar 20.2011 — #Sorry about the delay in responding - had an emergency situation that took a few days to bring under control.

MySQL has come a long way in recent years and is used by several large e-commerce sites. The one knock on it used to be that its support for referential integrity was weak, but they've addressed that in recent years and when using the InnoDB table type it works as expected. If you are expecting large tables you will want to take a look at how the OS's file system effects on table size.

Another thing to consider is clustering. If your analysis of the desired environment leads you to consider clustering (generally for fail-over, extreme uptime requirements, ie. >=99.99%, or large databases that need to distribute the workload), you will want to look at the commercial offering for MySQL and then compare it to the SQL Servers, UDB/DB2 and Oracles of the world before committing. (MySQL claims that their TOC is lower, but I haven't done the analysis.)

For most environments you should be good using MySQL.