Hello world. (what a cliche (: )
I would like your opinion about a website I am thinking of developing and if this is something that can be done (by me) or not. Here is my case.
A friend asked me some months ago to build an application for him so he can check his favorite soccer leagues the way HE wants it. Soccer clubs, Statistics etc. We were talking about 5-10 soccer leagues, mainly the most popular of Europe. I know there are already LOTS of sites doing exactly that thing, but since I wanted to get more familiar with web development I thought what the heck, I should try it and maybe even build a whole website so he can check online and more people use it. So I started reading PHP books (I was familiar with the basics of PHP but not OOP or anything complex) and figuring out how the architecture of the whole project should be. I also should say if not already clear that I have never tried to build a website although I have a general idea of how they work and I could probably set up a joomla site easily.
Thing is I could never imagine the amount of work and knowledge the project would need. I will try to give you a general idea of the application so you can give me an opinion, if you care doing so.
First of all there are soccer matches playing almost everyday. I should get the data (score, date, competition etc.) of these matches (at first manually and then maybe write a parsing script or something, especially if the leagues get more and more), validate my input, put it in XML files and/or database and then, after some processing, display the info and the stats to the website.
There are a million questions arising from this simple process that if asked I would flood the boards here. Some of them are: Which data should I put in a database and which in XML files? Should I use the XML DOMObject or simpleXML? How would that affect the performance? Should I load all the info for a League Table from the database, from an XML file that makes some calculations client-side (yes I need also to learn JavaScript and use AJAX), from an XML ready from the server, or from 20 different files, one for each Team in the League? Then i am going to have some difficulties in the architecture of my database since I have never created one, which one should be the primary key? should I use indexes and Foreign keys? Then I have no idea if I should use a website template to facilitate all these data or maybe use a CMS, or even build my own from scratch, which means I have to learn good CSS and HTML. Which would serve me better? And talking about serving, don’t let me get started about server questions.
Of course I don’t want you people to answer all these here but i am trying to give you a general idea of how I see things, how a new dilemma could arise from every decision and how limited/basic my knowledge is. I could start writing code but EVERYTHING needs planning ahead. I have studied a bit of all these technologies in the past (except JS) and the learning curve is not going to be THAT big, as if I was a total newbie. But I really want some opinions/advice/guidance, can this be made in a reasonable amount of time (let’s say a year??), or even at all be only one person or am I just hallucinating?
Thanks for your patience and any advice
edit: well i just realized that this thread should probably be posted in the General Web Development forum…
