Hi all,
I may have a rather unusual question. I was asked by someone if I could do a little project for him. I probably could, but I've never done anything like it, so I need some advice.
This person has a startup and basically all he wants to do is login to the application and fill in some fields to create an order that is stored in a database. Nothing fancy. The order can later be viewed in a full-fledged desktop application. The problem is he needs to do this while he is outside. So the application needs to run on a mobile phone or tablet.
I have no experience with this kind of development.
So my first thought was that I could make a simple website that they can log in to from any smartphone or tablet. The pro to this is that I'm not bound to a specific platform (say Windows).
However, my 'expertise' lies in WinForms, so that would certainly be easy for me. In that case I could create a webservice and use that to save the orders. But I have no experience in creating webservices either... Plus the software would have to run on a Windows tablet.
If I choose to create a website, which currently has my preference, I could use .NET or perhaps PHP as a back-end. I know .NET, but not the web stack. I've read that PHP isn't too hard to learn either.
I'm not a complete newb to web development, but I have no real world experience in it. I've only created some websites using simple HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No server-side work or anything.
The project is not in a hurry and I'm not sure if I'm even getting paid for it, but it would certainly be a nice project to learn some new techniques!
So any tips? What are things to consider? Techniques I could/should (or shouldn't) use? My problem is not that I need to learn new things. It's more that there are tons of things I could learn and I'm not sure which direction to take.
Thanks!