<p>If we don’t get into that technical about languages, then I think business sector love to use java beside the old cobol. </p>
<p>A real web application is a work of multi-group of specialists. I will name a few: software engineers who do the real application development; web designers, who design and create the layouts; server specialists, people who manage and maintain servers applications; content managers, people who create and write contents. </p>
<p>The list can go on forever if you wish. </p>
<p>If you take Facebook as an example, 1 per 3 million users is a huge responsibility. The essential skills needed for its development and maintainnce is a big engineering task. </p>
<p>But if you really like to learn more about software development, I think an undergraduate study in computer science is the only way out. You can still choose any major or any concentration you want. But there no way that anyone should or could call himself a software engineer without graduate from a formal computer science program. </p>
<p>If you have to develop college confidential entirely from scratch on your own, I think for people who have strong development experience in PHP, MySQL and basic HTML and CSS (and JS) experiences should be able to produce one in just a few days.
I think PHP and MySQL are quite common, and you will learn a lot from them. I am just suggesting that this combination is the most popular one. I don’t want to bring a heated debate on Python vs PHP vs JSP vs ASP.Net</p>
<p>To increase efficiency, and manageability, it is more convenient to develop your website using a web framework. For example, the most well-known Python web framework is Django. </p>
<p>Oh just a side note. In spring I attended a presentation on Groovy on Rails. The idea of Groovy on Rails is to allow non-technical people to become part of the development and maintenance effort. In other words, the syntax have been customized and defined more English-comprehensible. The strategy is to bring in business experts who don’t necessarily have any technical experience to collaborate in making decisions. You can’t run the entire website (which is really part of the business, part of the marketing) by the engineers.</p>