Technologies to use

G-Money

I have an idea for a website and I'm thinking about what technologies I should use to build it.

It would be a site with e-commerce abilities, so basically it would have products for sale which could be purchased via the normal online payment methods, credit card, PayPal etc.

It would also need a back-end to store the information about stock, orders, customers etc.

I was thinking that basically ASP.net or PHP would probably be best to use, with some sort of SQL database to store the product info on the back-end. As well as the back-end database, there would need to be an admin tool to allow others to upload new stock information.

I was thinking ASP.Net would possibly be the most suitable from the point of view of wanting to develop the front end and admin tool with the same technology. But perhaps that's not the best option?

I'm somewhat familiar with C# and Perl, however I am more comfortable with C# so that's what has me leaning towards ASP.net.

I have to admit I'm a newbie so this is a learning experience for me. The site itself may not actually ever see the light of day, but I am curious as to what it would take to build one so it would mostly be a hobby to work at in my spare time.

Thoughts as to what the best technology/technologies would be to use?

Thanks!

fasty

ASP.Net MVC is one of the best web frameworks I've had to deal with. You're familiar with C# so it makes sense.

It is the framework used by Stackoverflow.com

The best place to start is with the NerdDinner and MVC Sports Store tutorials. They should have more than enough content to help you get started.

amen

I think you are crazy trying to write yet another shopping cart aplication and solving all of the issues with payments, state management, user login, cc processing etc. If you have an idea for a web site your time would be better spent finding an off the shelf shopping cart that already implements all the required functionality for a shopping cart and then customising for your web site.

This would allow you to concentrate on growing your business by concentating on selling, marketing etc.

To my mind unless you are going to be selling a shoping cart application then the implementation is a non core activity. After all you wont create a bank to handle payments as banks already exists and it is a non core activity.

Feckfox

amen wrote: »

I think you are crazy trying to write yet another shopping cart aplication and solving all of the issues with payments, state management, user login, cc processing etc. If you have an idea for a web site your time would be better spent finding an off the shelf shopping cart that already implements all the required functionality for a shopping cart and then customising for your web site.

This would allow you to concentrate on growing your business by concentating on selling, marketing etc.

To my mind unless you are going to be selling a shoping cart application then the implementation is a non core activity. After all you wont create a bank to handle payments as banks already exists and it is a non core activity.

I'd agree with you if OP was starting a business but he says:

"I have to admit I'm a newbie so this is a learning experience for me. The site itself may not actually ever see the light of day, but I am curious as to what it would take to build one so it would mostly be a hobby to work at in my spare time."

Razzuh

I'd agree with the poster above that you should take the time to learn and use some kind of framework. It's a bit more learning up front but you'll be much better off as things move along.

If you decide to go with PHP, I'd suggest you use symfony (symfony-project.org). I has some of best documentation which is particularly helpful for beginners.

G-Money

amen wrote: »

I think you are crazy trying to write yet another shopping cart aplication and solving all of the issues with payments, state management, user login, cc processing etc. If you have an idea for a web site your time would be better spent finding an off the shelf shopping cart that already implements all the required functionality for a shopping cart and then customising for your web site.

This would allow you to concentrate on growing your business by concentating on selling, marketing etc.

To my mind unless you are going to be selling a shoping cart application then the implementation is a non core activity. After all you wont create a bank to handle payments as banks already exists and it is a non core activity.

I wouldn't be planning on writing a shopping cart utility. As for CC payment, I was planning on using one of those plug-in type services for handling all that.

John_Mc

Yeah I'd second the use of MVC for this. It will be a learning curve for you but at least you'll be learning the way the internet should work as opposed to the way Webforms hacked it to work like a desktop application.

ASP.net website has tonnes of documentation and tutorial videos which should point you in the right direction.

I'd also recommend using an ORM like Entity Framework or a lesser version such as Linq-to-SQL. It will dramatically reduce the time you'll need to spent on your data access layer.

Good luck