My ignorance is showing here. I've mostly avoided web development, but now I'm effectively a tech lead for developing a new webservice idea I proposed to my company; and finding my lack of web development means I don't know what tools I should be considering for development.
The fronted would most likely be your standard javascript, boost, & rectangular combination, not that it has to be. However, in terms of backed we need to pick what language and technology to develop with, and I don't know the modern options nearly as well as I should.
The site feels similar to kickstarter, in scope, size, and requirements, other then a more complex money handling mechanism and the need to plug into a number of third party tools/sites, hopefully via existing web facing APIs.
Were looking to develop everything in house and go straight to a final product, no need to slap together prototype demos for investors; but the first published site needs to be high enough quality to draw people in to use it; if it lacks sufficient polish to get regular use from release we risk loosing inertia and/or having someone else implement the idea better and steal our potential market share from us. We have limited resources, as developers have to fit in time on this around their main contracts. Further, while we have a number of highly skilled developers interested in expanding their skillsets, we don't really have anyone who already has expertise in this area.
So I need to balance the desire to make a site that is fully featured enough to drawn in users from day one and for them to trust us enough to try investing money in the concept; as well as scaling well enough to handle increased demand if our concept proves successful. However, I also need to do development with a limited resource pool and a desire to get something produced sooner rather then later so we can start making money to pay for more committed development.
Can anyone suggest good backend technology and tools for modern web backend? Particularly something that allows quicker development of a good starting site while still scaling well with future development to add far more complexity and expand scaling into the cloud VMs to support massive parallel use.
