Mimicing Greatness

[modmiddy]

I'm not really sure where this post would be appropriate. I have been away from this community for awhile though so I figured this would be appropriate.

I have an idea for a community that would work very much like myspace but would be different in enough ways to warrant creating such a site. I am new to programming and am considering building this myself.

I am curious what kind of languages were used to build Myspace or projects like it. Would this be something a single person could do on their own or would the amount of work and time be too great for one person and require a team of programmers? Any info would be most appreciated.

[JoeyDaly]

MySpace is built in ColdFusion - which costs a fair bit... but provides very fast development time. There would be a fairly detailed team behind MySpace to maintain and build further.

[modmiddy]

Is coldfusion something I could learn on my own? I am a rather quick learner, have massive amounts of free time on my hands, and while I don't know anything definitivly beyond HTML I am able to modify existing Javascript, PHP, MYSQL, CSS, and XML to an extensive degree to get the results I need (on previous projects I've worked on).

Assuming the answer to the above question is yes, is this an amount of work one person could do on their own or is this something a group of programmers would need to work on, due to the massive scope of the project?

[Bjfoster]

myspace is pretty deep, especially the fact that if (and i stress IF) your idea blows up as myspace did, your going to have people trying to hack passwords, spam the hell out of you, ect, ect. personally, i dont think its possible for one single person to deal with absolutely everything. you might be able to start it on your own.

theres tons of professional designers on here who know every language in and out and specialize in certain ones. im sure if you explained your idea to a few through a pm or something, (and were willing to share profits or pay them) youd be able to put together a team pretty fast.

[modmiddy]

I was considering going with one of the open source PHP based projections, considering I was told Facebook is done in PHP, and learning PHP myself so I could build upon it. I have no idea what kind of security nightmare PHP could be though. Should I be trying to decide on a language more based on security than ease of use and time of implementation?

I really appreciate the feedback guys =)

[paul_norman_81]

To minimise security risks and decrease development time with PHP you should very much consider using a framework (e.g. CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Zend FW, Symfony) which will provide a lot of classes (e.g. for security / authentication) out of the box and make this less of a concern when building your project.