OS and Prog Languages Choice

I would like some advice from experienced online businesses or people who have experience in dealing with these. I am wanting to create a website. On this website I will have local companies advertising services or whatever they wish to. It will be an online community specifically dealing with the local area of where I live.

Anyways, I am currently very involved with Perl CGI development on Linux systems. I envision this project to be done with Apache Web Server, MySQL backend, and Perl CGI scripts on a Linux OS. I choose this because this is what I am familiar with when it comes to development. I am not sure if any of these solutions are the best. Does anyone have any suggestions for OS, languages, database, web server to choose and why or why not choose what I listed?

Also, as previously stated I am going to want to have companies advertise on my site. I know nothing about online advertising....rates, how to do it, styles, how advertisements are made (languages, OS used in, etc). Any suggestions on where I can learn about this would be greatly appreciated as well.

I am very highly motivated about this, yet I know I have a lot to learn. If anyone can give me a push in the right direction, that would be great!

Thanks.

I think what you're used to sounds fine. I would probably swap out Perl for PHP but only because that's what I'm more comfortable with. JSP is also easy to work with.

I would swap perl for PHP because of speed. perl on average is 5x slower.

Linux makes excellent servers, but for pure reliability you may want to consider BSD. It has the longest uptime record of any OS and is extremely like linux. I plan to install OpenBSD soon on my server box.

For databases, to avoid licencing issues, go for PostGresSQL. It will cost you nothing.

I run a FreeBSD server and it is very solid. I have considered OpenBSD because it is supposed to be more secure. I like Postgres too, but it's hard to find as much info on it as MySQL, but it's a good db.

PostGresSQL is also entirely open source and won't cost a penny. It is very reliable but not so well known.

OpenBSD is much more secure (1 hole in 8 years) but not quite as fast.

...and of course no-one's complaining about Apache

Go with whatever you know - it's all pretty much interchangable. My preference would be for php or python with mysql on apache. Linux Debian on the server. But whatever works for you. You may also want to look at Ruby on Rails, which I've heard VERY good things about - it's supposed to enable very rapid database&web application design, and the language looks to be quite elegant.

However, keep in mind that if you are looking for hosting, LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP) servers are the cheapest and most common. Perl & Python will usually cost you more ( Perl has some scary security issues when run as a module, whilst mod_python is just catching on ).

Something like this shouldn't be too much work (depending on how much you need to learn). You can probably find prewritten scripts in php to do most of it for you, or to pull apart and see how they've done things.

The best thing to do is to sit down and plan things very carefully first, before firing up your code editor. Put a LOT of thought into designing your database structure as this is the most important factor - it'll define and limit whatever else you want to do.

Work out what type of ads you want to let people use - are we talking text eg: "shop x is a great place to buy items y and z", or .png/.gif/.jpg banner ads, or all-singing all-dancing shockwave flash monstrosities?

Spend a lot of time on google checking out similar sites. What have they done? How have they done it? What's missing from their design? What aspects are confusing? what can you do better?

--Simon