How would I go about creating an e-commerce website?

How should I go about creating a website, hosting and maintaining a website? And several other questions?

• I want to create a basic level website in which users can login via facebook, twitter, google, and I store their personal activity somewhere (in order to provide personal suggestions in future). The users should be able to comment on blog-type posts. Assume I have zero knowledge of web development and a beginner level knowledge of css and html. I have sufficient knowledge of C++, Java. I am open to learning new technologies, so feel free to bombard them. There are a couple of sub-questions. I would be glad if you can answer most of them/ or provide links/resources for these. 1. Which service provides cheapest and reliable hosting? 2. How do I start developing? First I use local-host (but isn't moving of files to web server a pain)? Which editors/ IDE's are helpful? What are different hack/tips for being poductive with front-end languages? 3. Which back-end language would be best? How would they communicate with front-end? 4. Which is the best database system to use? How to link these together? 5. Where should I read about FB/Twitter/Google integration? 6. How much time I should expect for each of these steps? Note: I don't want to use CMS which might limit my power to execute things. I would prefer to work on Linux, but Windows would be fine too. Also, what versioning system is best for web development?

• Answer:

  Well firstly, I think we have quite different ideas of what constitutes a "basic level" website. You want integration with 3rd party sites, recording of user activity, recommendations, and dynamically generated content. This isn't rocket science (apart from maybe the recommendation algorithm) but it certainly isn't "basic level" either. Secondly, a decent CMS isn't going to limit your power to execute things. As a beginner it would give you a framework and a *big* head start in development. It will also help you avoid many mistakes and gotchas that you currently probably have no idea about (using tokens to prevent CSRF for example). The site you've described would be relatively trivial to build in say Drupal or Wordpress as modules / plugins that provide *extensive* Twitter, FB and Google integration can be downloaded for free and installed by anyone with opposable thumbs. Assuming you wish to press ahead with developing from scratch, there are no right or wrong answers as to what technologies to use. They all work and they all have strengths and weaknesses. So, to answer your specific questions. 1. In the UK, I've used http://eukhost.com for about 10 years. For the price, their shared hosting solutions are incredible value for money and their support is first class. I'm afraid I can't advise on hosting the rest of the world (other than steer clear of GoDaddy of course, a tasteless company who's CEO likes shooting elephants). 2. To get started, I would just get a hosting account and develop directly on that. If you're using Linux you can remote mount via FTP or SFTP and apart from slight lag it's almost like developing locally. If you have the skills to set up a local development environment then you can use lftp to automatically synchronise your dev files to the shared server (disclaimer: lftp can be very slow). As for editors, there are a million choices. They're all good. Personally, I use Komodo IDE (a non-free IDE) and Geany (a free, very fast IDE-lite). Sublime Text is very popular. Notepad++ will do the job. VIM / Emacs are still popular in some circles. I'm not going to try and compress "productivity tips for front end languages" into a bullet point, it's far too big a subject. You could start by checking out some of the leading front end technologies. Check out Twitter Bootstrap, Angular.js, Backbone.js, Knockout.js. Ember.js. You might quickly find that you'll also want to investigate CSS pre-processors such as LESS, SASS, STYLUS. These are all pretty similar, just pick one that seems the most popular fit with the rest of the framework you choose. 3. As for back end technologies, there are many potential choices. Again, they all work and have different strengths and weaknesses. I think at this stage if you're interested in cutting edge web development you need to learn something that supports web sockets. Since you know Java, you might consider the "Play" framework. (I haven't used it but I would imagine it supports web sockets), there is also Wt, a C++ web development framework. Wt is obviously not a mainstream choice but it is very fast and a well developed, solid framework. To be helpful, I've summarised the mainstream choices that I suggest you consider at this stage. PHP - Simple and effective. Lots of sample code and applications. A solid choice for a beginner. Easy to find quality, cheap hosting. (Doesn't support web sockets, and I hate to say it but PHP may be looking a little long in the tooth) Ruby (on Rails): Very popular for developing the kind of app / site you describe. Excellent community. Another good choice for a beginner. Ruby on Rails is almost a halfway house between programming from scratch and a CMS. Node.js: My current favourite (though not for the faint hearted at this time). Node.js is an implementation of Chromes V8 JavaScript engine on the server. You can write your own webserver from scratch in about 6 lines of code. The advantage from my perspective is that (theoretically) you can structure your application so that code can run on either the client or the server. Add to this node.js is high performance and has a large, growing community of developers sharing their code. Node.js has a first class package manager (npm) which is helping to accelerate it's adoption. Packages such as http://socket.io, now.js, share.js, together.js fundamentally change how the web works - it's no longer "stateless". With node.js and http://socket.io the client and the server are seamlessly connected allowing real time communication between the client and the server (and between any connected clients mediated by the server). Other platforms can do this (the technology is called "comet") but node.js et al makes it very easy. Real time web is a game changer that hasn't quite gone mainstream yet - check out http://sharejs.org for a demo of the kind of thing that node.js makes easy. Python  / Django - can't say I have any experience of Django but it seems well regarded. Drupal - I'll list this separately from PHP because whilst it's written in PHP I consider them to be different platforms. Drupal is not without it's foibles but it's had a *huge* and active development community for a long time. As a result there are vast resources of code, documentation (though not always enough) and pre-built functionality. I could probably build a basic version of your site in a couple of hours using Drupal and I could reasonably assume there are pre-existing integration modules with FB, Twitter, and Google that will "just work" with very little effort on my part. .NET - contrary to what some people suggest, .NET is an excellent development framework, especially for commercial organisations. It's fast, robust, has massive library for dealing with "enterprisey stuff" Java (or rather the JVM) - a more portable alternative to .NET. Popular with large enterprises. Very high performance and can be used to compile and run other languages (such as Scala, PHP etc) to give them JVM levels of performance. 4. Which database: If you're using shared hosting, you've more than likely only got one choice - MySQL. There are better database systems (postgresql) but MySQL will be fine. You might also consider a NoSQL database such as MongoDB. Your choice of back end framework and/or hosting might guide your choice of database. 5. Google ! (and or http://Drupal.org).  Even if you don't use Drupal, you can still download Drupal modules to see how they have approached things. 6. Pure guesstimate, I'd allow 2 or 3 or 4 days (depending on your speed) for basic integration with *each* of those services. It might take less, but OAuth for example, as used by Twitter can take a little work to understand if you've never used it before. In the case of Twitter, there'll almost certainly be an OAuth implementation for the language you choose, so you should check that out. As for versioning, yet again plenty of choice. Git (and Github) is becoming something of a standard in open source development but there is also Subversion and Mercurial. I recommend learning Git. Hope that's helpful. I've missed out a lot, because there's a lot to miss out. You're welcome to ask further questions for clarification.