Is java the right language for a custom search engine marketing application?

[MiamiPPCPro]

I own a company that focuses on managing search engine marketing campaigns for local businesses. As such, I am currently licensing several applications to manage my client campaigns.

I am wondering what would be involved in creating an application that would rely heavily on receiving, aggregating, manipulating, and calculating data that we receive from the search engines to use in automated campaign optimization including things like bid management, keyword development/selection tools, ranking tools, analytical tools, conversion tracking, etc. Of course, this is driven by API's

We would also like to integrate things like an automated landing page creator, provisioning tools, ad copy generators (that would pull data from other campaigns in our system and recommend ad copy that is working well, etc), and aggregating all of this data into easy to read reporting portals, etc.

I put this in the Java forum because I believe that most of these things can be built in Java.

Here are my questions:

1. Is it in fact correct that Java is the right language to code this in?
   
2. realizing that this could be a tough question to give a general answer to, is it reasonable to think that a handful (4-5) really talented guys could create this type of very comprehensive application, with all of these different modules in 3-4 months?
   
3. If not, what is more realistic?

[chaarmann]

If you want to do all the coding yourself from the beginning on, you will need years to do it. I have once built up a whole portal (content management, user management, statistics, online-forms etc.) with a team of additional 3 really talented guys and it took us over 5 years. That makes 15 man-years. And I mean we have not used any pre-made portal like JBoss, Liferay, BEA, etc., just plain Java and a database. On the other side, I just took the open-source portal Liferay and adapted it to the needs of another client and finished within one month alone. Special needs prevented me to do that for the first client.

So your first task should be to make a research.
What do I want exactly? Which tools are essential to develop and which are nice to have? Which tools are already there?
To answer your first question, the language you should choose depends heavily on the essential tools that are already there. If most of them are written with .net, you most likely will use C#. if they are written in Java, you will use Java. if they are in PHP, you will use that. Most tools took decades of man-years to develop. You can't just take them and re-develop them in another language.

Once you figured out what you need you should make a rough design and from that a mock-up. This would probably take a month with your handful really talented programmers. It's called research cost. Only after that you can really figure out how long it takes, and estimate the real costs and developing time of the whole application.
It seems a huge task from the list of tools you like to develop, and I bet in the process of development you must lower your sight and make many concessions. Many things are not as easy to develop as you think. For example your ranking tool that should automatically improve the ranking for your customers in the search response. The search engines don't like to be cheated. They have many defenses against software that wants to manipulate their rankings. So it would be time-consuming and difficult to trick them. And once you figured out a trick, they may have defense against that in their new version, so you must constantly pay for new development. You should also include morality and fairness in your thoughts about the features of your tools. For example spamming tools will clearly help your marketing campaign and you could earn a lot of money with them, but do you really want to do it this ethically bad way?