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What is social media effect on commerce?

Should we use PHP or Java for a social media / e-commerce startup with a small budget at the beginning?

  • What would you advise a friend to use for his startup? A good friend of mine asked for my advise. He wants to create a mix between social media and e-commerce sites. He already had negotiations with some of the biggest german retailers and they were really excited about this. The new system has to be very secure bcs of payments and has to offer a really good API for the e-commerce solutions of the big retailer or (in the long term) for many more e-commerce sites. He has round about 6 months to realize it and at the beginning not that big budget. 2 friends of him were there and they said him that they would do it in Java, but because that he cant pay them their fully salary they will work as freelancers 50 % of their time each. Im only very experienced in PHP, so I said to him that I give him 3 (designer, developer) of our team and I will do the lead developing and project management for him. The problem with the Java solution would be that, if one of the 2 guys "breaks" away, we have to find a good Java developer quickly which could lead to some big problem for the time management. So my advise was to use PHP with the symfony framework and maybe some additional Java for search functionalities ( Lucene ). Some additional notes: He needs a prototype for the retailers. Thats why he couldn't pay that much at the beginning, but the developer would get shares and another high payment when some of the bit retailer invest. And he doesn't want to get many investors involved at the early stage.

  • Answer:

    Sounds like PHP is your best bet. On top of being a very popular web development language, it'd be easy for your friend to dabble in (if he wants to be more hands-on). That he's choosing between two half-time Java programmers versus one full time PHP programmer makes it a no-brainer - all things equal, the one PHP engineer would be more productive (i.e., get more done w/ less lines of code) with less communication overhead. Future hires would be easier as well, as PHP is again better aligned w/ web development in general and finding PHP guys for a website is pretty straight forward.

Allen Cheung at Quora Visit the source

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I'd go with PHP given what you're prompting with: 1.  PHP development is way faster than Java, even with the best developers. 2.  There's more code out there in PHP than Java, especially when it comes to social media.  Especially when it comes to Facebook, Twitter integration.  That saves you lots of time and money. 3. Freelance Java developers are more likely to be wooed as contractors for corporations while PHP freelance developers are less likely, making the ecosystem of those willing to work on your project that much larger and therefore theoretically lowering your costs. From a strict technical perspective: whatever your development team feels is best to do the job.  But from a business perspective, PHP has some distinct advantages.

Robert Accettura

I think this choice will have almost nothing to do with the characteristics of the languages themselves, and a lot more to do with the resources at your disposal. When it comes down to it, it isn't too difficult to build a solid application in either language: there's plenty of frameworks and code out there and to facilitate rapid development. If you are going to be the main development asset on this team, then you probably should use the language you are comfortable with, or else you will spend a considerable amount of time learning and moving relatively slowly--bottlenecking the companies growth. On the other hand, if you can see the team structured where you are writing a limited amount of code relative to other members, then let them drive this decision and be prepared to sit with them and learn things rapidly from them. Assuming you are a fairly solid developer, you should catch on quickly from working with them and you won't be too lost initially.

Anand Gupta

RE: java vs php.  php has some pretty solid e-commerce solutions--I don't think that's really the case with java.  I would say that speed is paramount here, the longer it takes to develop something the more money you will need to stay afloat. RE: php and Symfony. That would be a great bet if you are doing lots features/custom code--if you are just trying to publish content with ecommerce, Drupal might be worth a look. From my web startup experience (as the developer), it's less about the language and more about the marketing/traffic.  IE, more people equates to more money and people don't always know about or follow the best features/site/etc.  Think MVP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product) and iterative development--not what might be needed 6 months or a year from now. Lastly, I would suggest looking at it as an adventure and a great learning experience, not necessarily your chance to make billions :) Good Luck!

Tim Loudon

I'll second Allen's opinion. PHP is the way to go for your situation. Java is a heavyweight and it'll take more time/effort and hense money to put in place a viable solution. Also if you are planning on hiring more people later, finding good PHP guys won't cost you as much as Java.

Andrey Mandyev

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