Writing a Bitcoin exchange

[BitMofo]

I am planning on writing a European Bitcoin exchange for my Computer Science final year project.
The exchange will allow for a much larger variety of products such as swaps/forwards/options against other currencies (USD/BTC, EUR/BTC, GBP/BTC etc).
It will also allow for setting stop losses and (hopefully) the option to short.

Having not done any development work with Bitcoin in the past I was wondering if you could point me towards any useful documentation/ suggestions that could help me plan my implementation.
What hurdles will I need to be wary of?

I am looking forward to starting this exciting new project!

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[davout]

If you're developing exchange software with all the features you mention integrating Bitcoin is the easiest part.
Get your swaps/forwards/options working and then we'll talk

[Xenland]

If your exchange involves serving web pages http://bitcoindevkit.com is your library, However if you want to server pages AND do realtime proccessing your going to want to do a C++ and PHP method. PHP will serve pages, and C++ will do the proccessing however I don't have a C++ library for the Bitcoin Dev Kit project as of yet just the PHP so if your project can do with out the realtime and huge loads (which for a school project shouldn't be an issue) then you can create a PHP only exchange (which isn't recommended for anything serious like MTGox, you should defiantly use PHP and C++ like stated before.)

[davout]

If your exchange involves serving web pages http://bitcoindevkit.com is your library, However if you want to server pages AND do realtime proccessing your going to want to do a C++ and PHP method. PHP will serve pages, and C++ will do the proccessing however I don't have a C++ library for the Bitcoin Dev Kit project as of yet just the PHP so if your project can do with out the realtime and huge loads (which for a school project shouldn't be an issue) then you can create a PHP only exchange (which isn't recommended for anything serious like MTGox, you should defiantly use PHP and C++ like stated before.)

Ahem, you don't want PHP, C++, or {insert whatever language here}
You want something that serves a specific purpose, ease of maintenance, performance, etc.
Why not Ruby+Redis ? Why not Node.js+Mongodb ? Why not Erlang+Cassandra ? Why not PHP+MySQL ?
It's not the tool that matters, it's the skill with which you use it.

[Xenland]

If your exchange involves serving web pages http://bitcoindevkit.com is your library, However if you want to server pages AND do realtime proccessing your going to want to do a C++ and PHP method. PHP will serve pages, and C++ will do the proccessing however I don't have a C++ library for the Bitcoin Dev Kit project as of yet just the PHP so if your project can do with out the realtime and huge loads (which for a school project shouldn't be an issue) then you can create a PHP only exchange (which isn't recommended for anything serious like MTGox, you should defiantly use PHP and C++ like stated before.)

Ahem, you don't want PHP, C++, or {insert whatever language here}
You want something that serves a specific purpose, ease of maintenance, performance, etc.
Why not Ruby+Redis ? Why not Node.js+Mongodb ? Why not Erlang+Cassandra ? Why not PHP+MySQL ?
It's not the tool that matters, it's the skill with which you use it.

Thanks again davout for your lovely insight.