Online auction site - GUI and webservices

Other skills required: - AJAX - Javascript - TomCat running on Centos 6 - Sharepoint (not completely necessary) Basically, we're looking for a highly customisable web architecture that could be tweaked to perform a variety of tasks. After this web architecture has been written, we want it to be configured as an auction based online shopfront with the ability to dynamically link to separate projects. Inspiration should be taken from sharepoint, eBay and the open source project WeBid (we want a FAR more modern look than WeBid). I refer to sharepoint for its highly customisable structure and web part architecture. Also, the web service should be callable by other GUI architectures such as iOS/Android apps. We want a very modern and customisable web 2.0 GUI built with sharepoint style web parts. We want it to have a contemporary and engaging feel, similar to sites like [login to view URL] but better! Possibly something like [login to view URL] as well, but less formal and aimed at a younger audience. We want users, particular youth, to see the site as "cool". Stylesheets should be highly configurable. The GUI is to be built on a Java-TomCat architecture running on Centos 5, fully interactive with AJAX. We want the home page to be as functional, eye-catching and interactive as possible. Everything on the site should be considered as a web part, including top and side menus. The layout of the pages should be easily customisable. Page layouts, web part position and configuration should all be configurable through a set of config files (no sharepoint style design/configuration GUI required). Additionally to the web parts required for the online auction shop, we want some place holder web parts built: - Text only news aggregator that calls REST/SOAP - Thumbnail and text news aggregator that calls REST/SOAP - Feature article web part with large image and headline style title - Leader board web part - Various shape advertising webparts that can fit into various parts of the site (space should be left for these ad web parts) These web parts should be modular and it should be easy for us to create new ones. Images and other static content will sit completely separate to the GUI and webservice. Images will be written to a CIFS/SMB share (connection details set in a config file) and will be accessed through an nginx server separate to to the GUI and webservice servers. Both CIFS/SMB connection string and base image url are to be specified in a config file. A logical folder/file structure with filename and folder IDs is to be developed with high scalability to terabytes of static content in mind. You don't need to implement an nginx server in this development, just as long as the images can be written to a CIFS share and read from a separate base URL. The web service is to be completely separate and autonomous from the web GUI and static content cluster. This can be written in your choice of SOAP or REST. Whatever is chosen, I want an explanation justifying why you've chosen one over the other. My personal preference is REST. The web service is to interact with 2 separate read and write MySQL databases, configurable through a config file. The master database gets written to which in turn writes to read only slaves. You don't have to implement this DB structure in development, just as long as one can easily configure it to read and write to different database servers. You could have 2 config strings pointing to the same server in development, as long as you're confident that splitting it up will work. We will need a CMS for uploading content. Content should be associated with category, section, item or article ID which is referenced on the site through the WebPart config. It would be useful if the CMS was able to edit page layout and web part configs. This doesn't have to be as fancy as sharepoint but perhaps give us the ability to publish content and link it to an existing web part. Look forward to your proposals!