E-Commerce Tools For Students, What's Required?

profBill asks: "I'll be directing the "senior development project" this year for the Computer Science students in our department. The senior design project is supposed to give students a chance to bring together all their skills on a group project for some "practical" application. My overall goal this year is to have each group develop an e-commerce solution for local businesses near the university. I'd like them all to use open source software for various reasons (they're interested in it, it is easier to get hold of the software, just to show it can be done, to give them broader experience, etc.). The businesses are very interested and I think it will be a great experience all around. So the basic tools are things like PHP, MySQL, Perl and Apache but what else would be helpful? Note I don't want turnkey solutions, I want the students to develop the entire solution, from loading the OS to the final working system. What about Web page development? What about interfaces for end users? What have you used? What other issues? Opinions of the Slashdot community would be greatly appreciated." Now this sounds like an extremely cool project. I wish more colleges would look to do practical things like this with their students.

Comments

What we have done at my University

[SpaFF]

We've designed several database apps similar to what you are talking about for the lab on campus that I work at.
Basically we installed a barebones RedHat setup on a machine, locked it down, then compiled and configured Perl, Apache, PHP, and PostgreSQL.
They should be able to do the actual code writing from anywhere via ssh or ftping it over.
Be sure though that you teach them not only how to do the application part, but how to compile and configure the tools. You should also be sure to teach them how to secure the development machine properly, something thats usually left out in a class like that.

-Lee