PhD with no prior research experience, how?
Yes, In the UK, you can get accepted to a Ph.D. based on Bs.c. or Msc diploma, with no publication records. 

I can answer this, because computer science is my field, and saw many people like you doing research here in the UK. 

Background Work 

Ok so you want to do a Ph.D. with a postgraduate degree which is on the practical side of things. That is totally fine; however you need to do some work before finding a supervisor. In essence there are three types of supervisors in the field of computer science: 

Know it All: There are number of impressive supervisors, that know both the theoretical and practical side of computer science. These supervisors publications on both theory and practice (e.g., code generation, language design). This is the best kind of supervisors to have because they can bridge between theory and practice; and can navigate you through both theory and practice.

Theory-Oriented: They use Latex to create their papers/journals/books. They have no idea what so ever about the practical stuff. God forbid you ask them about JVM internals. They can still be useful, because you are covered the practical stuff; and they can help you through theory. However, they have no appreciation about how hard it is to make something work in practice. Also, they might not the best people to link between theory and practice.

Practical-Oriented: There are much fewer number of supervisors, that for example transferred from electronic engineering into computer science. They know very practical stuff (e.g., embedded system programming, active on developing Erlang application for telecommunication purposes); however for you these are the worst choice. Because, you have the practical background (so don't supervision on practical stuff), but because you need to introduce theory into your research they can't do much in helping you. So you end up wasting number of years just because for example your supervisor don't know game theory.

So overall look for their publications and the track record. How much open-source software they produce. How much theory-oriented paper they publish. These are the things that you will curse yourself later on during Ph.D. if you didn't think it through.