Thanks everyone for your help, I think I’ve been able to refine my questions a bit so I’ll need just a little more advice. This situation is this now: the client has decided to fund this project, and I’m in charge of it. We’re going to decide our strategy in a meeting tomorrow morning, which means throwing in with M$ or Sun, which is what I’ve boiled the options down to. In fact, unless someone can convince me otherwise (and I don’t think anyone here is likely to try) I’ll be recommending using Solaris for the simple reason that we’re already maintaining a few Solaris servers.

This, of course, rules out .net, but there are still decisions to be made. Now keep in mind I’m learning here, so I may get some of the terms wrong, but the next thing I apparently have to decide on is an application server. For our current web project the web developers are using Oracle 9i Application Server, but they question it’s stability. However, they can’t offer me any suggestions of anything else to use, so I suppose I have to ask: what is the best, most stable application server I can run on Solaris? Keep in mind that there will be thousands of users and security is of utmost importance. It also has to be PKI enabled, or so I’m told.

As far as actual development, it seems that using JSPs is the way to go based on what I’ve read here, are there any other suggestions? If we go with Oracle 9i, I’m being told that JDeveloper is what I’d probably want to use to create them. BTW, as I said before, the backend will most definitely be Oracle.

If it sounds like I’m in over my head, you better believe it’s true! I feel like I’m walking around blind and half deaf. The worst thing is that the “web guys” around here don’t seem to know much more than I do. Fortunately with the new funding I’ll be able to hire another person for my team who’ll presumably actually know about this stuff, but I have to know which technology we’re going to be using before I can hire someone who knows it. Thus, I am relying on the expertise of you guys, some of who clearly work with this stuff everyday. Any help would be greatly appreciated, especially before I have this meeting in which we’ll be deciding what I’ll be doing for the next several months. Oh, and if there are any skilled web developers out there who’d like to move to San Antonio, Texas . . .