I have to develop a online product catalog which will eventually developed into a simple online ordering system, I have never developed a web application before. Please recommend an application framework which might be a good choice for this kind of apps.
Is Ruby on Rails a good choice?
Thanks.
Definitely Ruby on Rails a Good Canditate for developing online e-commerce application , There are many e-commerce application developed in Ruby on Rails , which are successfully running .
Open source e-commerce application spree
Shopify CMS for online store .
Agile web development book has explained the working of rails with an example how to develop a product catalog , which will be more helpful for you.
Many plugins and gems available for payment gateway like the Payment gem .
What more you could need to develop an online store .If your resources are less and the development time should be speedy then rails a good candidate for your requirement.
Finally its your interest and skills set and choose the platform which suits your requirement :)
Hope this helps !
Rails is as a good choice as any other web framework can be.
Here are a few links to help you getting started with it.
And for your online ordering feature, you could look at Active Merchant.
Is it necessary to develop it yourself?
There are a number of great drop in solutions for a catalog/shop application. Some offer both the source code for customized deployment, others offer a package including hosting, setup and maintenance. In addition to what's already been mentioned, here are a few more e-commerce solutions that are ready to do.
Keep your hosting solution in mind when deciding how to proceed. A lot more hosts offer PHP than rails.
Do you really want to reinvent the wheel?
If you've never written a web application before do NOT start with something that involves billing. That's a good way to end up in a lot of trouble. Billing is hard to get right, and if you get it wrong you can end up facing huge fines or even in court. In most cases, you have to comply with PCI DSS security standards, and if you fail to do so and information is lost or stolen, you're likely looking at $500,000 in fines.
If you absolutely must do e-commerce, outsource it to PayPal or Google Checkout so that your risk is limited mainly to charging people the wrong amount by accident.
That warning out of the way, Rails is a good place to start if you've never done web development before. It has it's problems, but they'll go unnoticed until you've been working with it for at least two or three years. i.e., they're fairly minor, and are likely to annoy only a very experienced developer with significant project requirements.
Full disclosure: Google is my employer, so obviously I think you should opt for the Google Checkout option.