Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
Questions asking us to recommend or find a tool, library or favorite off-site resource are off-topic for Stack Overflow as they tend to attract opinionated answers and spam. Instead, describe the problem and what has been done so far to solve it.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I am taking over a lot of the ColdFusion stuff that is lingering at our shop and they are insistent it stay on ColdFusion and that new projects in this area MUST be done in CF - basically this part is non-negotiable. I am not very experienced in CF (haven't touched it since 2003) so most of my development has been in .Net, MVC, C#, Linq-to-SQL in the past 4-5 years.
I was doing some looking around for a MVC framework that I could relate my Asp.Net MVC experience to and hopefully an integrated ORM (I am stuck using CF 8 at least for a while). I have found a few like Model-and-glue, Mach II and Coldbox etc. but I don't really know where to start and wanted to get some opinions on the advantages, disadvantages, etc. of each of them from people who use them.
I know that I will need to do an extensive brushing-up (pretty much re-learning) of CFML, so I don't need to be told that - I am looking into the future here.
Could you please share any information you have on CF MVC Frameworks to help me choose which one will be best for me? Thank you.
Seeing you are NEW to ColdFusion what I would do is pick ONE FRAMEWORK and stick to it. At first it will be hard you will have problems and you will be tempted to drop the Framework you have chosen but don't do it. After you have mastered one framework then you can learn the others.
CF Wheels
ColdBox * * * (Nice Documentation)
FarCry
Framework/1 * * (simple LIGHT framework)
FuseBox
ModelGlue
Mach-II
Most of these you can add
ColdSpring
Reactor
Transfer
An introduction to ColdFusion frameworks at Adobe.com
Most important is to remember we all have our opinions but there is NO real proof what is best. You can even NOT use a actual framework and just code carefully in MVC.
The stuff you are currently maintaining
I would pick ColdBox, ModelGlue or Framework/1.
ColdBox provides a little Code Generation and Framework/1 is very light so less to learn.
I've been using CFWheels for a couple of years and I've not found a better framework. It's inspired by Ruby on Rails and is very easy to learn with great docs and a very active community.
www.cfwheels.org
I teach a course in ColdFusion and use Sean Corfield's Framework/1 in the classroom. It's lightweight and has a very gentle learning curve, which makes it especially good for transitioning existing codebases. But at the same time, it's easy for a team of developers to work with and can scale to large apps. It's the framework that feels least like a framework and most like natural code, to me anyway.
http://github.com/seancorfield/fw1/
I wanted to give a +1 for cfwheels.
Since 2003, I've used Mach II, ColdBox, Fusebox, and Model-Glue for various projects. All had their pros and cons (Fusebox is the only one I'd avoid now) but, with a recent project, I decided to try CFWheels.
Using Wheels has been a blast. I've had a great time developing a site for some friends in my small town who own and operate an Ice Climbing and Guiding site ([www.ourayclimbing.com]). Nice SES URLs, runs great on Adobe CF and Railo, the admin was insanely easy to get going with the Scaffolding plugin, convention over configuration (which I love :)), etc.
In any case, if you stick with the major players (ColdBox, CFWheels, Mach II or Model-Glue), I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at what CF can offer you.
It has to be coldbox really.
It has excellent documentation on the site, and also has a book which has been brilliantly written to cover many aspects about object orientated programming, amongst other topics. Honestly, really impressed by the book, more than I was expecting.
What I like about the framework is that it uses coldfusion code in its handlers, when I picked it up I think the other frameworks where using xml...not sure if this has changed.
The framework is easy to pick up if you are knowledgeable on CFCs, and has several useful features for building sites. PLugins, Debug toolbar, URL rooting for "pretty URLS"..
I cant speak highly enough of the framework..
Theres also a really helpful community here who respond to all my questions really promptly.
I'd suggest checking out Mach-II. It's used on numerous extremely high-profile, high-traffic sites and has been for years. This blog post is a bit old at this point but still has some great info in it in terms of Mach-II in general as well as who uses Mach-II.
It's under very active development (don't let the lower version numbers compared with other frameworks fool you) with version 1.9 just around the corner and big plans for 2.0.
Big features of Mach-II include sophisticated caching and logging functionality, a very nice dashboard for helping with development and monitoring of your applications, a rich form tag library complete with data binding, and tons more.
I'd go with either CFWheels or FW/1. Both are very easy to use for those new to CF frameworks (I still count myself in that group) and don't have nearly as steep a learning curve as some others. Coldbox looks amazingly powerful, but I had a hard time getting my head around it.
You might also like my SOS and COOP frameworks. We are in the process of creating better public docs. It will likely be more like the code you are used to than other options.
You could also look at ColdBox. http://www.coldbox.org/
Loads of documentation and loads of features.
There's also Farcry Core Framework http://www.farcrycore.org/
It has to be said that you'll need to make your own mind up which framework you like best or whether to build one of your own. It really depends on what you want out of the framework.
In terms of ORM for ColdFusion 8 you have Transfer ORM (http://www.transfer-orm.com) and Reactor (http://www.reactorframework.org/)
Though, given that ColdFusion is java application on top of a java server, there is no reason why you couldn't go ahead and use Hibernate (http://www.hibernate.org/) ColdFusion 9 does make using hibernate much easier, but you're stuck on 8 for the moment.
Everything is negotiable. Rewriting the CF apps in Rails 3 would be the strongest approach.
Languages and frameworks built on principles - Ruby/Rails 3 (and other Ruby frameworks), Python/Django 1.2 (and other Python frameworks), ASP.NET MVC 2 - are generally speaking the best thing to use.
ColdFusion and ColdFusion frameworks do not compare because ColdFusion as a language and as a library is hacked together at random and the ColdFusion frameworks (ColdBox, FW/1, Model-Glue, CFWheels, Mach II) can only do so much to smooth that over. For example: CF scopes, lack of closures, lack of loadable classes/components (you can instantiate a component, but not load the component as such), awkward arguments handling, mappings, lack of real applications, lack of delegates and closures, and convenient but non-rigorous approaches to most aspects of the language and library. In comparison, the other languages listed offer rigor plus sugar atop the rigor.
Related
A partner has a website that needs to be rebuild from scratch as it simply can't cope with the large number of visitors (currently build using SilverStripe). The site should be able to deal with 5 million or more members using 20+ languages.
We were considering using CodeIgniter or YII because from research both appear to be excellent performers. However several people advised that we should consider the latest version of Joomla for this. For small websites we are happy to use Joomla but for a heavy load website our feeling says that we have to stay away from that. We are however not able to find any comparison between both from a performance point of view but we do require good arguments why Joomla would or would not at all be a good candidate for this. One comparison can be found here: http://vschart.com/compare/yii/vs/joomla/vs/codeigniter however this doens't tell me what to expect when the number of visitors is really high.
Can some advise how Joomla compares to CodeIngitor or YII considering that the site will receive a very high number of vistors and will use a 20+ languages (for silverstripe we build a translator module as the build in CMS was not usefull when using so many translators).
When you're dealing with a site of that scale, it's probably best not to shift to Joomla. Joomla can handle a fair bit, but I'd suggest that it would be far easier to have a Joomla site that large when the site has been adapting as the traffic increases.
Part of what makes your question hard to answer is that we don't know much about what your current site does.
Is it mainly a CMS? If so, Drupal may be a decent fit for you.
Is it a custom web application? It sounds like it could be, based on the number of translations you're handling.
Is it somewhere in-between? This could also be what you're dealing with.
If you're looking at either of the bottom two options, yes, shifting away from SilverStripe (but not to Joomla) sounds like it might be a good thing.
Given the volume of traffic you're dealing with, it sounds like you probably already have a revenue stream and a development team. In that case, it might be worth having a few of your developers play with CodeIgniter and Yii and see what they think.
I wrote up a detailed answer to a question about what type of framework to choose a while ago, which you can look over here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10095906/yii-or-zend-or-other-frameworks-under-the-following-requirements/10115678#10115678
I'm a Yii fan, having checked out a bunch of other frameworks. Regardless of which framework you use, I'd like to offer one piece of advice that I've found key on all projects I've worked on.
You want to work with objects, not data arrays
The reason for the above is that your models (and the objects they produce) can end up having your business logic built into them. Doing this makes life far, far easier in the long run. A great book on the subject, aimed at manager's and quite high-level (there is no code, although there might be a few lines of psuedo-code), is Object Technology: A Manager's Guide. I'd highly recommend it.
Framework thoughts
CakePHP
I started dabbling with CakePHP until I found out it didn't hand back objects (just arrays), at which point I ran screaming.
CodeIgniter
Looking at what CodeIgniter has for database model support, I think you would quickly hit its limitations with a site of your size, so would recommend against it. And having EllisLabs deciding to leave CodeIgniter behind (see their website for more details) is not a good sign. The signs say stay away.
Of the PHP frameworks out there, these are the ones I hear the most things about:
Symfony 2
Yii (disclosure: I work with this one daily)
Laravel
Symfony
From what I can see of it, has been a huge stimulus to the PHP community and many best practices have come out of that community. Unit testing, Composer, pushes for PSR-1/2, the ideal of modularity of code (some of their core code is ending up in Drupal 8) are all great things that have spurred the PHP community into writing code that's better than spaghetti code. With that said, it feels kind of heavy and enterprise-y and looked to have a pretty heavy learning curve.
Yii
When I was looking for a framework, I had a lot of legacy code that needed migration. Yii's way of handling things, although opinionated at times, has done a lot for me as far as exposing me to good practices that are used heavily on the web. Highly recommended as well.
Laravel
When I was looking for a framework (2+ years ago), Laravel didn't exist. It's apparently quite slick and cutting edge (haven't looked at it yet, I've been busy landing new work regularly in the Yii world), but I am interested in dabbling with it. That said, here's a thoughtful article about Laravel and couple of considerations that I've wondered about.
The main developer, Taylor Ortwell, seemed to be a dominant force. That's a great thing while he's making money doing this and enjoying it. Not sure what would happen to the framework if he decided to do something else.
The speed of development on the framework is an awesome thing and means that all sorts of creative juices are flowing. It's a great place to go look at cool new things. That said, you're going to want your developers to be able to easily find information about the framework they're working with, which in 3-6 months may be severely out of date in the Laravel community. The Ruby on Rails community has the same type of good/bad problem when I've looked around over there; there is so much information about the new stuff that sometimes it's hard to find information about the version of the framework you're dealing with.
That said, there are lots of cool choices out there :-) I should probably wrap up, as this has gone on far longer than I'd intended. Let us know what you end up deciding and how it ends up going.
How big is the site really? Bigger than joomla.org?
Are you talking about big in terms of the amount of content in the database or in terms of the number of visitors.
Joomla really does not have problems with scale unless you are on an older version of MySQL in which case it slows down.
It depends on what kind of application you want.
If you want a CMS, Joomla is the way to go. Because this is what it was build for.
If you are about to create a real "custom" application Yii/Codeigniter is the way to go. (This is what yii was build for)
Regarding performance, from my expericnece Yii is a lot faster, because it comes with way less overhead. You can build the application just as you need it.
Well it's like compare green and salty. Really joomla is CMS, and Yii and CI are frameworks. If you considering make highload on joomla - it's not your job.
If you have high frontend load - maybe watch on js frameworks? Yii+backbone.js or ext.js for frontend is awesome, since you'll move alot to clientside.
CI is dead. I honestly like it, but its dead already. No extensions, no namespaces in future, nothing.
I can say + of Yii:
*faster then CI;
*have great documentation and wiki articles;
*have great and active community and developers;
What else i can add? Active record is good for small databases, but not usable for highloads. Also as i said on yii you can easily make js framework+yii composition. Yii have good caching system. Long time support of stable versions.
I personally manage highload now, but its more backend/api/database. 150+ thousands database records daily, 300+ thousands requests to api, 50 milions records data table. It works like a clock for more then 2 months already.
Choose what you like, or write on native php if its really big system - best choice from practice.
Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which
enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many
aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla
the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is
an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.
CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for
people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to
develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code
from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed
tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access
these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project
by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.
Yii is a free, open-source Web application development framework
written in PHP5 that promotes clean, DRY design and encourages rapid
development. It works to streamline your application development and
helps to ensure an extremely efficient, extensible, and maintainable
end product.
Joomla can't compare with CodeIgniter / Yii. But, If you need any CMS for your project, you can use Joomla (or maybe Wordpress). If you want to create any web application, then you need to decide for any PHP Framework. I use CodeIgniter for years, and I like it. They have a huge community, and the best user guide. Yii also has a great community and a lot of features. So, you can decide depending on you demand.
I've recently heavily gotten into Javascript programming. Currently I'm building a 'Fat client' powered by a PHP-based REST webservice.
This is going pretty well, but I want to learn more.. become an expert if you will.
My background is mostly MVC in PHP, so building true real-time GUI applications based on the MVC model is pretty new. MVC exists in PHP, but it's quite different. In javascript, because it's 'live' there's a much stronger emphasis for message-passing and events.
I'm learning based on the YUI3 and Backbone.js frameworks. I believe this is a solid foundation. I do feel though that, in order to become better I should try to learn from other (non-javascript) MVC systems.
I have some (very distant) memories of playing around with both Visual Basic and Delphi (6 and 7). Even though I'm sure these have solid frameworks behind them, there must be other frameworks out there that are great to learn from. I'd love to see a solid, non-javascript, lightweight framework or language I can learn from and borrow concepts from.
So my real question is: in the great history of GUI programming, what are some good examples of articles, books, or codebases I can read to strengthen my understanding of MVC, what has worked in the past and what has not, and how to create an elegant but powerful design.
Chapter 11 of Beautiful Architecture is about the MVC architecture in Emacs. Even if Emacs is not your cup of tea, it's still an interesting case study. An application that has been in active use and development for 24 years must be doing something right.
It cost a bit of money but the DoFactory stuff is great, I used it. Show how to implement enterprise level applications with MVC and a few other frameworks.
http://www.dofactory.com/products/products.aspx
Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.
Closed 10 years ago.
Improve this question
What is a best way to organize many software development projects, interaction with clients, project documentation, sources, emails, knowledge, time tracking, issue and features tracking, support for releases and versions etc. for a small company?
For me (and I believe for many others) it is obvious that it must be some sort of web-based solutions. It would be great if it could provide an interface for iPhone (if not, it is also OK).
Important thing: it must be hosted on our servers, so PHP + MySQL is the best platform so far.
I have found the following system to consider:
http://www.activecollab.com/ (but I didn't found issue tracking as well as support for releases and versions, so it is not the best match for software development company)
http://www.mantisbt.org/ (Great tool, but no project planing...)
http://www.twproject.com/ (didn't try yet, but it has very strange interface)
But none of them is a 100% solution for me.
It also should (but not must) support SCRUM
We have about 25 people in our team and about 50 from client side. At once we run about 3-7 projects (some in dev. phase, some in support).
So, my questions: does anybody knows any good web-based system that gives everything software development company needs? I believe this information will be useful for many of us.
I would recommend FogBugz
They have a very interesting (admittedly not everyone's cup of tea) scheduling system and is apparently supporting scrum.
Their support for release management is something i'm particularly fond of, but i should also say that i have very little experience of other similar systems.
Another feature that I like is the ability to link different e-mail accounts as well as pure HTML forms to different projects.
Oh, and it is not a MySQL/PHP solution.
Some of the features are:
Issue tracking
Project planning
Scheduling
Customer support
Wiki
References:
Scrum and Fogbugz / Fogbugz questions / FogBugz Knowledge Exchange
I think it really depends on your company size. I used activecollab for a while but it never really convinced me and then they made it commercial anyway. There is an open source fork of it called ProjectPier.
Even if it is not MySQL + PHP but Ruby On Rails Redmine convinced me the most from all tools I tried (and installing the ruby module into apache is a question of 5 minutes). It is simpel and yet has anything I need (including Eclipse Mylyn, SCM integration, E-Mail Notification and time tracking). With a little RoR knowledge it is easily customizable, too.
The most popular Open Source sollution is probably Trac. It is written in Python, so it is not a PHP either.
But maybe it makes sense to consider a non PHP sollution. I didn't find any PHP open source tool that had the functionality and simplicity of Redmine or Trac. If you don't mind a hosted sollution Basecamp is probably the first address to turn to (never tried it though).
Trac with Agilo plugin might be a good option.
Here is link for Trac pluigns, some category are:
Code Documentation
User feedback and discussions
For another pespective - having used many of the above solutions, and liking them very much for bug tracking, wiki documentation and tracking information - I tend to move towards keeping much of my project "meta-data" (summary information pulling together wiki, bugs, schedules, communication) in spreadsheets now.
For those now climbing onto the top rope of the ring preparing for a takedown, here's why... I come from a programming background, and one of the best books I read early in my career was The Pragmatic Programmer. One of the tenets they preach is finding a fundamental editor that you like, and get good with it (for various Very Good Reasons). After trying (frustratingly) to port and adapt my PM/Dev Management approach multiple times to multiple systems, I've extrapolated that Pragmatic tooling philosophy to the product/project management world I now inhabit. To stretch the metaphor, my editor is now Excel.
I can't guarantee that for any company I work with, they have "Software Project Management xyz" or "Bug Tracking System abc" with the proper plugins - but I can be darn well sure they have Excel or some variant available. I know if I get ninja-like with that tool, I can continue to use it - and focus on the project, not the tools.
This spreadsheet approach comes with some caveats:
Excel done poorly can suck. We've all seen that. Watch for bloat and stupidity.
Keep the bugs in the bug tracking system, the wiki stuff in the wiki. The spreadsheet is meant to pull this stuff together, not replace it.
Keep it readable. Don't stuff everything in just because you can. Summary sheets are good.
Try to standardize your templates and macros meaningfully for tasks and information, to maximize reuse over time and projects. Just like good programming.
Back it up - use a document management system if you can. This approach isn't in the cloud or hosted centrally by default, so be aware of that.
Have you tried Assembla? They've recently released a new product called Portfolio which is great if you have to manage multiple projects + you get free clients! :)
You might like to consider http://targetprocess.com/ We use that in my current job and it works pretty well, from a developer point of view. I'm unsure as to whether it supports your installation requirements, however.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 3 years ago.
Improve this question
So, I've got an idea for a website. I can start off using any platform and frameworks I want, but there are almost too many options.
OS Platform:
Windows, *nix
Web Framework:
Rails, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Zend, Cake, others
Hosting:
EC2, Dedicated Server, Shared Hosting, VPS, App Engine, Azure, others
Persistence:
S3, MySql, PostreSql, Sql Server, SimpleDB, CouchDB, others
How do you avoid decision paralysis and get started?
Firstly, your familiarity with a framework's language should dictate which framework you choose. Don't add the burden of learning another language on top of learning a framework.
Next, have a look at the remaining frameworks. Do they have good documentation? What about the community. (A good community can go a long way to making up any shortcomings of a given technology.) Does the framework solve the problems that you need solved?
Finally, just dive in and try something! Pick the one that makes the most sense to you and start writing code. Don't do too much hand-wringing over your decision. If it becomes obvious that you made the wrong choice, it should be obvious quite early. Learn from what you've accomplished so far and consider restarting with a different technology. (Just don't get several weeks down the road before you make this decision!)
I'm sure you don't like all of those technologies equally. Pick a framework that you like and get to work.
It depends on what your app is going to be doing. A handful of the technologies you listed are direct competitors (like Django vs. Rails), but some are completely different ways to do things (like MySQL vs. S3).
Questions to answer before you begin:
Will the app need to be horizontally partitioned in the near term? If so, using EC2, Google App Engine or Azure would be a good option.
Will your app fit into the constraints of Google App Engine? If so, it requires a lot less hassle on your part than running on bare metal (whether real or virtual).
What's your preferred web framework? If you want an MS framework, you'll need to run on a host that supports that.
What will your persistence and data access patterns look like? This will determine whether to use a database or something more exotic.
If you are running on EC2, the other AWS services are more appealing. Similarly, if you are using GAE, you have only one option for persistence. If you are using Rails, may as well start with MySQL.
In answer to your question of how to reduce the number of options, the answer is to realize that many of the options are related, so you don't have as many choices to make as it first appears.
Some advice that was once given to me is, pick what your friends (or colleagues) are using. Having people around you that you can share ideas and the learning experience with is invaluable.
If you want to learn something new: I'd just go with your gut and get started. If it sucks then switch to something more familiar.
If you don't have much time: Go with what you know and forget about the other options. Just start coding.
Optimize for happiness. Pick the one that you like the most. Or the one that intrigues you the most.
I've worked in Microsoft shops, in Ruby on Rails, and in homegrown shops having Apache, Jetty, even Mason.
All frameworks have their warts, their idiosyncracies that will keep you up until 3 AM, and their "tribal knowledge" vagaries that will be completely unexportable to other frameworks. (The last point is sometimes by design, the whole "platform entrenchment" business strategy)
Listen to what the supporters of the frameworks say about the problems with the other frameworks (Google: X framework vs Y framework). Pick the framework that has the loudest supporters. If they are equally loud, make the decision with a dice roll.
With me it's simple.
I only know MS stack and see no point in "checking out" all of those you mentioned.
No, actually I once tried to use JSF before excluding it from my list permanently.
Use what you are experienced in and where you can be more productive. The objective is to get your site up and running. Go for it.
One of the biggest factors in determining which platform/framework to use is your budget. You have to factor in the cost of licensing, software required to develop/maintain your website and other miscellaneous costs.
I suggest you begin with a scorecard of your own construction. Perhaps you can find different ones on the web, but if you do, modify them to meet YOUR needs. There should be a scorecard for each level in the stack (as you've described). Each scorecard should share some aspects to grade with other scorecards but each will also have their unique aspects.
Once constructed, weight each aspect graded according to your needs.
Once you've chosen the weights, pick the scales for grades.
At this point promise yourself you wont mess with the weights or the scale and then start collecting data on your options for each level in the stack.
You may also want to put a time limit on the collection period.
Make your decision based on the outcome of the scorecard.
The beauty of this approach is that the effort is made in constructing the scorecard, not in circular arguments of options. The effort in making the scorecard is vendor agnostic and focuses on the desired result, not the options. Thus you can avoid paralysis.
One more thing, my best scorecards have included sections addressing the availability of resources and other human related things. Don't make the mistake of just looking at the technology.
good luck.
Go for personal preferences.
One decision at a time:
Firts I would begin with type of language:
Script: PHP, Python,
Serious: Java, .Net
The language will restrict your OS, plattform and will give you hints for the dataabse decission. The database load is also important. And, Do you want logic in the DDBB? how much data?
Last advice. Try combinations well tested. LAMP, WAMP, Windows with SQL Server and .NET.
Evaluate each platform and technology for quality of tools for your needs. For example, if you are cost sensitive, you would value free operating systems and tools higher than costly ones. If you need performance, you would value tools which provide high performance higher than ones that don't.
It entirely depends on your situation. I spent several months evaluating stuff for a new commercial web site last year, and it was very easy to feel paralized. In the end it was talking to several people who'd done similar things, and of course reading a lot of stuff online and from Amazon. I chose Java, since our team had a lot of experience in it, and it has good performance and extensive supporting technologies. Oracle is our database but we used a persistence manager to make it easy to change later on. We used a half-dozen very good libraries to eliminate much of the boring and repetitive coding (Restlet, iBatis, Freemarker, XStream, jQuery, SLF4J). We used Glassfish as our web server.
Yours sounds like a small project with only you to work on it. In that case, pick a complete framework instead of a smorgasbord like we did. Pick something fun to work with, and something with good "return on resume". Look very hard at Ruby on Rails, Django (kind of a Python on Rails), and Groovy on Grails (a Rails-wannabe for the Java world). In your shoes I'd pick Ruby on Rails because there's a large and growing community and a good number of books and tutorials. Plus, Ruby looks like a worthwhile language to learn. For your database, just pick one. These frameworks make it easy to change your mind later. Pick MySQL unless you have another you like better.
And as other posters said, just do it! ;-)
Like others said, pick something you and your employees are familiar with. I highly doubt you are close to being industry ready with all those techs.
OS Platform: Windows, *nix
Shouldn't matter except for Windows licensing costs, and that is probably the least of your expenses.
Web Framework: Rails, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Django, Zend, Cake, others
Dependent on your favorite language
Hosting: EC2, Dedicated Server, Shared Hosting, VPS, App Engine, Azure, others
You should design your product to be movable, so you can scale among these. If you know for sure you are going big, then just start off with EC2. App Engine is extremely limiting, ex. they don't let you form outbound connections.
Persistence: S3, MySql, PostreSql, Sql Server, SimpleDB, CouchDB, others
You need to do the research yourself whether or not your product requires an RDBMS or a simple key/value store, and what features each of these have.
Just go for it! Your platform choice really is not all that important as long as you make a reasonable choice (Ruby + Rails, Python + Django, PHP + Cake/CodeIgniter). Any of these can be used to build successful sites. If your site really takes off, you'll be able to scale it fine.
Closed. This question is opinion-based. It is not currently accepting answers.
Want to improve this question? Update the question so it can be answered with facts and citations by editing this post.
Closed 8 years ago.
Improve this question
I'm facing developing a new web app in the future and I'm wondering how to decide what framework to use. I've settled on Python as my language of choice. But there are still may frameworks to choose from! More generally how do you choose between different similar technologies that are still in the works as the latest round of web frameworks are? I'm curious what your process is for deciding on technologies you've never used.
Recognize that no choice is perfect -- or even very good.
No matter what you choose, someone will have a suggestion that -- they claim -- is better.
No matter what you choose, some part of your tech. stack will fail to live up to your expectations.
The most important thing is "shared nothing" so that the components can be replaced.
After that, the next most important thing is automatically-generated features to reduce or prevent programming.
Look at Django. Lots of automatic admin features make life very pleasant.
There are a number of things you can do:
Download the frameworks and build something similar with them for comparison.
Look for comparisons by other people, but attempt to understand the bias of the reviewer.
Observe the community at work, see what people are building and the issues they run into when using the technology. Forums, blogs, mailing list etc are good places to check out.
Go to conferences and meet like minded developers interested.
You can also take the approach of using stable versions rather than alpha bits. After a while you might move closer the bleeding edge. People associated with the project in question are generally more biased than those approaching from other platforms, be careful who you trust.
Consider the impact of using a bleeding edge framework versus an established one. Sometimes it's important to your customers that you are on one perceived as stable. At other times this doesn't matter. How comfortable are you with fixing the framework itself? Great developers will learn the internals, or at least know enough to keep things moving whilst a bug is sent to the framework mailing list etc.
Consider some general best practices in building abstractions and reusable code on the python platform. You may be able to save yourself some work in moving to another platform. However, don't be a reuse junkie as this can limit the effectiveness of your use of the framework. The 37Signals guys are right when they talk about extracting frameworks from working code rather than building frameworks from scratch.
I know this is an old posting, but I am in a similar situation (again) and I think there are other people who may want to look for different opinions, and hear of (somewhat) successful experiences.
Since baudtack mentioned Python, I will try to answer this along the lines of my experiences using Python. Here is what has been working for me:
determine the scope of your project - outlining what your application is supposed to be able to do without introducing any programming or design notes will clarify your goals greatly
determine how you would like to work with your code, stack and data:
a. what sort of programming paradigm do you want to work with? i.e. object-oriented, functional, etc. do you want to play to your programming style or do you want to follow somebody else's programming style?
b. use semantic web or not? do you want greater control over URIs and their design? (I found web.py great for this by the way - It is my choice to create REST APIs in Python)
c. do you want to be trapped by framework requirements, or do you want a better separation of the application from the web component, i.e. use a framework to utilize your application as a set of modules, for example. My problem with Django was that I ended up not programming Python, but having to learn more Django than I needed to. If that works for you, then that is the way to go.
d. data stores... some sort of SQL vs. non RDBMS (xml databases like eXist-db with full xquery support) vs. OODBMS vs. a combination of the above? how complicated do you need this to be? how much control/separation do you need to have over how data gets stored and recalled in your application?
e. testing: unit tests... thank goodness for python! if your web app has the potential to grow (as they often do), having a sane and coherent testing platform to begin with will help out a lot in the future - I wish I had learned about this earlier on. oh well... better late than never.
f. how much control over the server do you need? hosting considerations? how much control over an Apache instance do you need to have? OS specific needs? I found that using shared hosting providers like Webfaction has been great. I eventually found I needed greater needs for flexibility and bandwidth. In other words, what can you get for your budget? If you have USD50 to spend each month, it may be better to consider a virtual hosting solution like Linode....
Finally, I echo S.Lott's sentiments that no choice for a solution is perfect, and are subject to obsolescence.
Experience trumps hearsay. I've found that prototyping is a huge help. Make a prototype that uses the features you expect to be the most important for various frameworks. This helps route out any features that may not work "as advertised."
In general though, kudos for being willing to look at new technologies.
I have a set of criteria in different categories:
Activity & Documentation
Is there an active user base?
Is there an active development base?
Is the support responsive and information accessible?
Are there user and development guides and reference material?
These are essential, there needs to be traceability of all of these to build confidence in the solution.
Ease of use
Are basic features easy and complex features possible? I typically give a new framework a test drive and try to roll out a set of use cases to see how intuitive the framework is to use.
Is installation intuitive and simple for a local/dev installation and production deployment?
How is it backed up and upgraded?
What is the effort and UX for implementing a "Hello World" type blog post, static page, menu item, and plugin?
How are versions dealt with for the core & plugins?
Example (on the topic of Automated Testing/Continuous Integration solutions)
Several years ago I evaluated several Automated Testing solution. At the time Jenkins and TeamCity were front runners and in the end I chose TeamCity because of the UX, active user & development base and quality of accessible documentation.
Example (CMS for a blog)
This criteria is also why I prefer to use Wordpress over other options. While wordpress has its shortcomings, the user and development base is strong and active which leads to a software architecture with more potential to evolve over time and maintain its relevance and a development community that provides quality plugins and themes to choose from.