I'm starting on this new project that is going to include a bunch of pieces -- Mobile/internet connected apps for three distinct types of entities, web interfaces, backend server, database work, use of payment processing services, eventual connection to social networking sites, etc.

Some of this has been done at a "demo" level, but no real infrastructure for this system is in place. I have a lot of programming experience in the form of C/C++/Java/Python/etc, my database experience is only so-so, and I know relatively little about web programming. Furthermore, I'm definitely not going to be the person to put a slick GUI together. A lot of that work (webby stuff, GUI implementation) will be outsourced.

My idea is to do the following... Implement everything as a prototype in Python so that each of these pieces can run concurrently on a single machine. I'm not worried about a nice GUI - text menus are fine. The client apps will talk to the backend by means of a RESTful type API. The API should be pretty straightforward. We're not doing anything too crazy. I want to be able to fully contain this system in a "sandbox" running on a single machine so that when work is outsourced, the developers can just connect to a sandboxed system, and they know exactly what they need to implement. Hopefully the python code will work as a detailed specification.

Just hoping to get some opinions on this approach. Good idea, bad idea? Will it be difficult to maintain both (1) a "sandbox" version using a Python-based http server and SQLite in parallel to (2) a "real" version that connects to Apache/MySQL. (this is my plan).

I'm only assuming that RESTful APIs are the way to go these days for interconnected systems like this. Any opinions?

Dude, this is such a generic explanation, it's hard to give any helpful input without anything else. I get that you probably don't want to provide a lot of specifics, but you're going to have to give a little more than this for anyone to be able to give any helpful input.

If you're just asking if this is possible, the answer is obviously yes. If you want more input, we need a few more details.

Not a problem, thanks anyway... I was thinking that before I started down this path that someone might warn me - "Hey, I had to do the same type of thing, but I ran into problems X, Y, and Z. And I wish I would've done this..." (I was thinking about issues with security mostly, but also thought someone just might know a shrink-wrapped solution to prototype things like this).

I've done some very basic client/server stuff in the past, but it was always just communication over sockets with some homebrewed API... I talked to someone, though, and he said design a RESTful API for your clients to talk to your server, and I had no idea really what that meant. I knew very little about the webby world.

But I've read a ton online, got a book, started implementing, and I have things at a very early "proof-of-concept" stage. I'm comfortable now that I can proceed like this, and really don't need any additional input here.