E-Commerce Programming Language

B

benamaster

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Aug 16, 2005
Messages
1,146
Hello Everyone,

I have been an active reader of hardforums.com for quite some time, but now I need some help.

I am on a team at the Bay Arenac Career Center in Bay City, Michigan. The team is part of the Business Professionals of America and we need to develop a E-Commerce site that is ficticious for an ficticious travel company that gives tours in New York City. The site needs to handle the booking of tours, while making sure that no tour is over booked, along with print an invoice and have a shopping cart and accept fake credit card information.

My question is what language should I use for the front end? I have experience mainly with PHP but know C# and VB.NET so I think I could handle ASP. We plan on using MySQL or an Access Database file on a Windows 2000 or 2003 server or we could use Linux, whichever would be best. My personal site http://www.benadamski.com uses a Linux server with MySQL.

Thank You
 
I would say php and mysql. Access is a bad choice, as its a flat file database and will be slow, especially if your database becomes large.
 
i'd recommend mysql or sql server (if you want to get the license for it). avoid access, because once the database gets large (with over 15,000 records), then you will be spending a lot of time doing database maintenance to "compact and repair".

as for language, that's really your call, but what you will be interacting with and future upgrade/maintenance choices can influence what base you will develop from. some questions i could think of are:

- who will be supporting this application once it goes live? (updates, fixes, etc.)

- (especially if you do not plan on suporting this application throughout the life cycle) how capable are the support person(s) in the language that the e-commerce app will be written in?

- what are the recommendations/requirements for working directly with visa, mastercard, amex, etc.?

- nearly all merchant accounts have development tools to allow e-commerce developers to have their software interact with payment processors (eBay, verisign, etc.). what language(s) are these tools provided in?

- are you going to budget having a security firm review your application? my personal thought is that this is a lot less expensive than the costs of being hacked.

hope this helps to give some ideas!
 
BBowermaster said:
I would say php and mysql. Access is a bad choice, as its a flat file database and will be slow, especially if your database becomes large.
Click to expand...


technically mysql is a flatfile database.



Original Poster:
Technically since this isn't a live site you could base this off any database you'd like. That really doesn't matter for the scope of this project.

The language also depends on your server. If you are running 2k/2k3 then use C#/ASP.net but if you are using *nix use Perl, Ruby, or Python.

I'd stay away from PHP until 5.1 when the supposed "production ready" release comes out. However, many still have their doubts that php will ever pass a hobbiest status. (Don't flame me, look at coroprate sites most run .net or J2EE, and there is tons of legacy perl kicking around doing a very good job)
 
Well there is a site live right now its https://www.batechcentral.com/whenpigsflypm which is the site from 2 years ago. I will have to maintain the server. Its entered into a competition where there are Regionals in January, States in March, and Nationals in May.

There wouldn't really be any support people, I am the "programmer" on the team and the rest of the students just do graphics and stuff.

For Credit Card Processing it says it has to interface into a Mechant Account Gateway.

I am not sure what Payment processor we would be using, because right now the site for the past 2 years hasn't. So I need to set that up. Are there any suggestions? Way back we used Authorize.NET

We don't worry about being hacked. Security is important for grading points at competition but its created just for competitive purposes.
 
If you want to stick with MS apps I would suggest using MSDE, its a free stripped-down version of SQL Server that unlike Access, doesn't corrupt itself when you get multiple people using it at once.

PEAR, PHP, and MySQL would be my choice personally.
 
If I was going to do it with something I know I'd use PHP and Postgresql. ACID is good, especially when dealing with finances!

If I was going to do it to learn I'd do it properly with C# and Postgresql
 
Its seems like there are two sides the ASP with C# or VB.NET or the PHP side but both sides are using some form of SQL.

Does anyone know of any good C# or VB.NET books on how to use them with ASP.NET?
 
benamaster said:
Its seems like there are two sides the ASP with C# or VB.NET or the PHP side but both sides are using some form of SQL.

Does anyone know of any good C# or VB.NET books on how to use them with ASP.NET?
Click to expand...
check out "asp.net unleashed" from sams publishing. the code-behind is for vb.net, but nearly all examples require only a small syntax conversion to c#.
 
I'd reccomend looking into oscommerce (www.oscommerce.com). It is a great shopping cart system, complete with inventory control and management. There is an active community around it, and I've developed an extremely popular ecommerce site around it that does hundreds of orders per day.

Why re-invent the wheel (unless there is a reason to do so).
 
I've looked into using osCommerce but we pretty much have to reinvent the wheel by making everything ourselves because they look at the code.But I have to do inventory management and all

Thanks PTNL I just ordered that book after you mentioned it, it looks very helpful!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top