I am developing an e-commerce website where we need to have 2 store views. One for the professional customer and another for the retail customer.
We need to have the same inventory but different product description, different attributes, and look and feel for wholesale/retail customer groups.
Can you be a little more specific on what you mean by 'filter'.
I think you are referring to either different domains for each type of customer i.e. mysite-wholesale.com and mysite-retail.com or different urls i.e. mysite/wholesale.com and mysite/retail.com and you want the same codebase and backend for each site but simple some different attributes?
If so then this is possible and you can find a good explanation on how to go about this here
All of Magento, with its catalog management and display tools, along with themes, is designed with this scenario in mind. Generally you attach a store view with its associated catalog, pricing and inventory to a unique URL (e.g. wholesale.store.com and retail.store.com). Here are blog posts on how to do this in Magento v1.3 and v1.4, however you could take a couple of different approaches.
One option for this is to write a custom module that binds an Observer to the customer_login event, and then sets a redirect to the Store that you have associated with their Customer Group.
There's nice blog post on how to use Observers in Magento, and a cheat sheet of known Events. You can search Stack Overflow for pointers on starting the development of a custom module. That should get headed in the right direction.