General ideas around non-synchronized, serversided networking

New to this forum, and I'm not terribly sure this is an acceptable question, but here it goes:

We're developing a game with Unity, intended for Facebook, and perhaps in the future Android (or possibly iOS(?)). Anyway, as far as I've understood the scripting references and what not, for this game we will not need state synchronization nor network view. It's hard to explain the game exactly, but picture somthing like farville. It's that kind of thing, and you can trade with other people (friends on facebook, is the general idea). All I need is something like remote procedure calls to be sent to the server when ever someone wants to do something, and a RPC call will be sent back to the client. Files will be written to the server, such as how much money you've got, etc, etc. So if you want to see how much money your friend's got, it will be fetched from the server, obviously. Since it's such a simple game in terms of graphic, all trading an what not will also be done through the server. (No peer-to-peer).

(Rationally, I think it would be more logical to make this game in Flash, but I really love the super-object-oriented way Unity works. Flash makes no sense to me, the way you have to put scripts on the frames themselves, not to mention that there is no project panel where you can see all your scripts.)

By the way, this is not a particularly high budget production, so we're going to use an old desktop we found lying around. I'm thinking of going with a simple Linux-based server OS. I'm not entirely sure how to write ther server side of the game though. I've heard I'm supposed to use PHP, and as far as I've seen it's not a terribly difficult language to learn, but I have at the moment no idea how to set it up.

The main idea of this question is for you to give some general thoughts on how this may be accomplished, both from the client side of things and the server side.
I know this is covered in great detail out there, but I think this will help a lot of us "newbies" out there, who are new to networking in Unity.

 

Have a look at xamp if you want to get started with PHP

 

Not saying I necessarely want to do it in PHP, if I can do the server side of things in JavaScript only, that would be neet-o

 

PHP and HTTP will work for this quite well. JavaScript is usually client side in the web world, but Node.js might be good for you.

 

sounds like you could get away with running an app engine to handle the server side.