Web programming job - difficulty?

[etherealfocus]

I'm working on integrating a vendor's Vortx product catalog into our company's BigCommerce web store. 27k items, 10 attributes (soon to be 30). The vendor supplied us with what looks like solid documentation and recommended we hire a web programmer with experience consuming web resources.

My question is whether this project really requires an experienced programmer or whether I might be able to take care of it myself. I have a good basic understanding of XHTML and XML, and I've been reading the w3schools.com tutorials on everything else - so far, nothing too over my head.

The vendor's recommendation is to use SOA, SOAP, WSDL, and EDI. I've been reading up on them but still not exactly sure how they all work together.

Am I getting in way over my head or might I be able to figure it out with some study time and save the company a few thousand bucks on hiring a web programmer? Speaking of which, what price range would be reasonable if we do hire a programmer?

Thanks!

 

[JamesV]

If you do it yourself, and something goes wrong, is the savings of not hiring a programmer to do it initially greater then the net loss of sales you might incur from having your site down?

I'm pretty savvy with alot of web-based languages, and I'd hire someone if I was in your position. You can't do your job if you are constantly having to figure out a problem in your code, and if you have to hire a programmer later, it will take alot longer for them to fix your code then it would if they coded originally.

As far as price, it depends on the size and complexity of the job. Shop around and ask for quotes.

 

[Ancalagon44]

You know XHTML and XML, but do you know web services, jquery, javascript, and other non markup languages?

XHTML are both markup languages - they can describe how something will look, but not really how it will function. For such integration, you would need a program that can connect to a web service (most likely), download a set of results, and then interpret those results.

I think you would need someone with more experience. A lot more.

 

[etherealfocus]

I've got an ad up on craigslist and gotten a few promising responses. I think we're pretty well set on hiring a programmer - if nothing else, this is big business season for us and the programmer will be able to complete the job faster so we get more orders.

Next goal is getting a fair price and finding a competent programmer. I've gotten some responses that were obviously form letters and others that barely looked like English.

It looks like a pretty straightforward job for anyone that has experience with this stuff. We need an ASP.NET solution that pulls data from our vendor's API into our BigCommerce store using their RESTful API. 27k products, 10 attributes (soon to be 30). Got one offer for 2000 from a guy that seems very competent and has a ton of experience, says he can do it in 4-5 days. Definitely on the high end of what we were expecting, but we don't actually know how big of a job this is.

Thoughts?

 

[Ancalagon44]

I dont know much about restful APIs, but 4-5 days sounds about right, considering time spent testing.

Really, it is a very simple procedure - download an XML file from their server, parse it according to a schema provided by them, and then map those fields to fields on your own objects. But integration does make it more complicated - I'm thinking this guy might need to be based at your office to test this, to make sure it will work, plus, it would be a good idea to have a test environment setup for him to play around in. Do you have a test environment for him?

 

[etherealfocus]

Working on the test environment right now. I just started this job and haven't gotten the lay of the land yet. I thought we were putting the new site on our server but just found out we're putting it on a VPS from myhosting.com (CentOS) - so no ASP.NET after all.

 

[Leros]

The time (and cost) it would take you to ramp up on what you need to know would probably outweigh the costs of hiring somebody who already knows how to this sort of thing.

 

[beginner99]

If you think experts are expensive wait and see what amateurs will cost you.

Get a developer. Learning by doing is great to learn programming but never do it on a system critical for the success of a company.

Then I'm rather unclear about the requirements. As far as I understood this happens all in the background? Why would you need ASP.Net for that?

I would say 2000 is pretty low especially considering since this is an outside guy whatever he does should be documented very well because changes are you won't be able to get "support" from the initial creator.