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Commercial website programming

Z

z0mb13

Lifer
Hello guys, first of all TIA for your help/inputs.

I am considering to start an online business in my home country (south east asia) that will be web based. Basically it is like an online store to buy stuff.

I will hire some programmers/web designers to do the coding and design. However I am now almost completely clueless regarding the current trend of web design. Some questions:

- What is the programming language of choice for web developers now? My website will be quite simple (think like woot.com, with forums for discussion, and ability to upload items for sale easily), and it needs to somehow interact with a database system (store customer info, inventory, etc). I want to be able to do minor tweaks on the website/programming, so I will need to pick up the programming language.
- can ATOT please give some advice on what resources I need to consider for the above? Of course I will start small so I will still use a hosting service for the website and also the database.

Thanks a lot for your help!
 
There is no one language of choice, though (ASP.NET/SQL Server) and (php/MySQL) are probably the two most popular stacks at the moment.
 
Markbnj said:
There is no one language of choice, though (ASP.NET/SQL Server) and (php/MySQL) are probably the two most popular stacks at the moment.
Click to expand...

I'd also throw in ruby on rails as a growing platform. There have been some impressive sites done in it the last few years.
 
Train said:
I'd also throw in ruby on rails as a growing platform. There have been some impressive sites done in it the last few years.
Click to expand...

An interesting language, but I wouldn't put it out as a commercial platform just yet. The hype for it has slowly started to die off in many ways.

ASP.NET (using C#) or php would probably be the best choices for something commercial. I prefer ASP myself. MVC is pretty dang slick.
 
If you go with shared hosting, then finding hosting is where you want to start. You probably want your site hosted within the geographic region of your target audience and you'll want to find a host with a good reputation. What your budget is will also limit the plans you have to choose from. The hosting plans you find to consider that meet those criteria will limit your choice of server side languages.
 
Last edited:
Cogman said:
An interesting language, but I wouldn't put it out as a commercial platform just yet. The hype for it has slowly started to die off in many ways.

ASP.NET (using C#) or php would probably be the best choices for something commercial. I prefer ASP myself. MVC is pretty dang slick.
Click to expand...

With the latest release of Rails 3.0 working on Ruby 1.9 things have improved dramatically in very recent times. Not only has Rails become much faster out of the box it's much more flexible than it was now that it uses Rack as a base.

Developing self contained sites/apps that are simple to deploy has become really easy with Rails. With Phusion Passenger for Apache there's no need for the complicated reverse proxy deployments to your app server that were necessary when Mongrel was being used as the app server.
 
Crusty said:
With the latest release of Rails 3.0 working on Ruby 1.9 things have improved dramatically in very recent times. Not only has Rails become much faster out of the box it's much more flexible than it was now that it uses Rack as a base.

Developing self contained sites/apps that are simple to deploy has become really easy with Rails. With Phusion Passenger for Apache there's no need for the complicated reverse proxy deployments to your app server that were necessary when Mongrel was being used as the app server.
Click to expand...
I'm not saying it won't be viable. Just that it is still a little new for my taste. I usually prefer to wait until after the deification of a language ends before deciding to use it in a major application.

For small personal applications (and perhaps midsized personal applications) I have no issues with ruby. It is when you expand past that point that things seem to get hairy.
 
37 Signals has been a shining beacon of web development the past few years. Often pointed to as a small company that is smart and kicks ass (thier commercial apps are very successfull)

But then again, they also CREATED RoR so of course they are good with it.

I wouldnt call it new, released in 2004, it's beoome quite mature.

That being said, I actually DISLIKE RoR. Went through a tutorial on it a few years ago and absolutely hated it.

I would pick .Net any day of the week myself. But even in .Net the jump from ASP.Net 1.1 to 2.0 was huge, glad I waited. The webforms in 1.1 were simply disgusting. And then with MVC... my gut told me to wait until MVC 2, and I was right, huge improvements. I think RoR has gotten past it's early phases, and as 37Signals proves, can make just as good an app as any platform.
 
GaryJohnson said:
If you go with shared hosting, then finding hosting is where you want to start. You probably want your site hosted within the geographic region of your target audience and you'll want to find a host with a good reputation. What your budget is will also limit the plans you have to choose from. The hosting plans you find to consider that meet those criteria will limit your choice of server side languages.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by server side language? So each hosting server has its own programming language that you want to use? Is this mainly for the database query language (like mySQL or SQL?) The scripting language for web design shouldn't be hosting dependant, right?

What is woot.com programmed in? Can I tell just by looking at the source code?

Thanks a lot guys for the input.
 
A website's code that you can 'look at' is not usually it's source code. It is the output you receive from the server. The Javascript you can see is client side source that makes the HTML more dynamic inside your browser.

Each webserver runs on top of the Server's Operating system. In Microsoft's world you usually will usually see Server 2003 or Server 2008 boxes. Each of these will run ASP scripting or some form of .NET on top of IIS, Microsoft's web server software.

On Linux or some other Unix-like OS, you will usually have PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails as the main scripting language running on top of Apache's web server. Older hosting services will probably only offer PERL or some form of PHP 4. Stay away from those last two.

If you own your own server Microsoft's IIS 7.x is very nice to run non ASP classic or .NET languages on. Ruby, PHP and Python run really, really nice via FastCGI and the URL Rewrite module in my opinion is easier in IIS than it is in Apache. However, Linux still offers you more lateral movement and options in regards to proxy and reverse proxy for load balancing etc. NginX and Lighttpd are really mature and speed daemons compared to Apache. FastCGI is more robust than Apache modules when deploying large websites.

Ruby on Rails is fantastic. However, I think for most people it is a bit overkill. PHP 5 running on a 512mb Linux Virtual Server is far more robust. You can run CodeIgniter or Kohana and that bastard will run fast and let you grow with time. Avoid Python unless you want to really cabbage on to the people you hire.

Also, make sure they know how to incorporate KeyPair store's like Memcached and NoSQL into your site so you can scale outward geographically if you need to. Nothing like building a site with MySQL and some sort of framework and then figuring out you could have saved a lot of time and effort using mongodb ( nosql ) and pushed it into memcache with little effort instead of serializing arrays into fields inside a table and pulling them into and out of the table via data models that need huge ORMs or custom SQL.
 
hooflung said:
A website's code that you can 'look at' is not usually it's source code. It is the output you receive from the server. The Javascript you can see is client side source that makes the HTML more dynamic inside your browser.

Each webserver runs on top of the Server's Operating system. In Microsoft's world you usually will usually see Server 2003 or Server 2008 boxes. Each of these will run ASP scripting or some form of .NET on top of IIS, Microsoft's web server software.

On Linux or some other Unix-like OS, you will usually have PHP, Python or Ruby on Rails as the main scripting language running on top of Apache's web server. Older hosting services will probably only offer PERL or some form of PHP 4. Stay away from those last two.

If you own your own server Microsoft's IIS 7.x is very nice to run non ASP classic or .NET languages on. Ruby, PHP and Python run really, really nice via FastCGI and the URL Rewrite module in my opinion is easier in IIS than it is in Apache. However, Linux still offers you more lateral movement and options in regards to proxy and reverse proxy for load balancing etc. NginX and Lighttpd are really mature and speed daemons compared to Apache. FastCGI is more robust than Apache modules when deploying large websites.

Ruby on Rails is fantastic. However, I think for most people it is a bit overkill. PHP 5 running on a 512mb Linux Virtual Server is far more robust. You can run CodeIgniter or Kohana and that bastard will run fast and let you grow with time. Avoid Python unless you want to really cabbage on to the people you hire.

Also, make sure they know how to incorporate KeyPair store's like Memcached and NoSQL into your site so you can scale outward geographically if you need to. Nothing like building a site with MySQL and some sort of framework and then figuring out you could have saved a lot of time and effort using mongodb ( nosql ) and pushed it into memcache with little effort instead of serializing arrays into fields inside a table and pulling them into and out of the table via data models that need huge ORMs or custom SQL.
Click to expand...

Hooflung thanks a lot for your extensive info! 🙂
 
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