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Closed 12 years ago.
I've to start my master thesis project and I've to choose a technology to work with. I've used Rails and ASP MVC, in two projects, but never used Django, only some play with it. But I've some experience with python and really like the admin interface.
The objective of my master thesis is a creation of portal to a public hospital.
I have several years of experience with .NET and C#, but the other alternatives are appealing too.
In terms of philosophy, all three are open-source, and ASP MVC works in Mono.
What are your opinion?
UPDATE 1: By your opinion, I mean share your experiences(good and bad), advantages, disadvantages with this frameworks.
UPDATE 2: Btw the portal will be used by the patients or potential patients...
Thanks
IMO the only reason to consider .net is if the hospital deploys on windows. Deploying anything else on windows is a pain, and deploying .net on any other platform is a pain. (IMO)
Beyond that, I think the best thing to do was get a rough idea of what you want the portal to do, then look at library support.
After that, its just really what language do you prefer.
UPDATE:
As for my experiences on each: I have 4 years of webforms experience, and played around with MVC. Pluses are that it is mind rendingly fast, and the deploy experience is pretty damn simple. Tooling is decent too, especially the SQL Server frontend, never seen another db tool as good. Down side is that it just doesn't do as much for you as django or rails, in fact, it doesn't really come close. Also, you are going to have to type 3-4x as much due to the language, although some people think the tools make up for the verbosity.
For rails, I have about 8 months professional experience with it. Plus side is there is a plugin for almost everything, and the framework is pretty packed with things that make your life easier. Personally, ruby is also my favorite imperative language, its the kind of thing where you achieve multiple levels of enlightenment as your knowledge of the platform deepens. Down side is that we are in the middle of a transitional period right now in both rails and ruby, so documentation, recommendations, and library support is probably going to be up in the air for the next 8 months or so.
Finally, I am really not an expert on python or django, but I have played around with both. The language is very similar to ruby (meant for productivity over perf, dynamic, very elegant design), but differs quite strongly in philosophy. Pythonistas believe there should be one (and only one) clear and concise way to do things. Rubyists (like perl monks) believe that there should be many nuanced ways of doing something, and that elegant code is like elegant language; expressiveness is paramount.
I would say rails has an edge over django at the moment, due to more eyeballs over a greater period of time. That wont last forever though, django is wildly popular and in a few years I am sure support for both frameworks will be roughly equal. It really comes down to a philosophy thing with these two platforms. If you look at a library that pushes the language in some strange directions that take awhile to grok, but once you do you realize is quite an elegant way to do things, chances are you are a ruby guy. If you look at something like that and say "Ok, so thats clever, but they really should have done it the way that everyone else does it, cause non standard use of syntax really sticks in my craw", chances are you are a python guy.
I think that is totally up to you. In this case, everyone else opinion seems useless.
According what you say, there is no technology limitation and you are totally free to chose anything you want. It's impossible to find an objective criteria.
It would depend if you're more interested on improving your ASP NET / C# skills and giving MVC a try or if you want to learn something totally new.
Any of those options is correct, it depends on your taste which one to pick.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I like to experiment with different languages to keep my interest alive when working on small side projects away from my day job.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to steer away from Django and Ruby on Rails because of a couple of features they come packed with (or that are mostly default and easily integrated): authentication and automatic admin interface. Django comes with both, with Rails you just have to add ActiveAdmin as a gem and you're ready to go.
When I try to experiment with different frameworks and languages (Noir for Clojure, Express for Node), most of the times I find interesting languages I'd love to work with but whose "web framework" idea is just some convenience method for routing and parsing URLs and requests, leaving you alone with all the common and annoying parts of web development, like form validation, user authentication and profiling, having a working admin interface and so on, all things that Django and RoR provide to you for free.
What other languages and frameworks have such commodities? I'm aware of some PHP frameworks like Symfony, but I really have used PHP for too long in pas years and I'm pretty fed of it. Thanks.
Stick with RoR in my opinion. It's still a young yet powerful framework. It's well maintained and quickly plugged whenever a security risk becomes known.
It doesn't really matter what kind of MVC framework you use since it all comes down to the programmer. Ruby on Rails cuts out the painful part of programming (IMO) and allows you to do the enjoyable parts. Requiring knowledge of SQL is very minimal within Rails unless you're doing complicated scoping.
If I kept searching around for different languages to explore after I found one that suited all of my needs and then some, I would never get anything done. Moving from PHP/CakePHP to Rails is definitely an upgrade in my opinion, but at this point, you're better off committing to one language (Python/Django or Ruby/Rails).
I would stick with Django. Having worked in everything from classic ASP, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, Java, PHP and Rails, I can state, unequivocally that Django is hands-down the easiest to work with, most profitable framework I've ever used.
Rails does have some pretty controllers, but it pales in comparison when you get down to functionality. Sure, Rails has lots of plugins, but Django has nearly everything you need under one roof. Django-admin alone is a friggin' gold mine. I work full-time as a Technical Architect, but also own my own business. Switching from Rails to Django in 2008 was the single best thing I ever did for my business.
If you want something flexible, modular, easy-to-extend and incredibly well documented - Django is your ticket. You also see far, far fewer of these lovely posts with Django.
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Closed 11 years ago.
So i'm a windows/unix sysadmin wanting lo learn some web development.Here is a list of what i'm planning to learn and want to do :
i'm planning to do that only as a hobby,for a couple of personal applications and my office little "intranet" (phone book,list of machines,a list of useful links and a password protected area for reserved info)
i only have a basic understanding of html (i can read and modify it without problems but not writing it as a web developer),no javascript/css
i used Ruby on Rails 2.x for the actual little office intranet,with a lot of copy and paste of html/css and a lot of scaffolding...so i know only the base of the old RoR
i'm developing on a Windows machine and wanna rebuild from scratch my little application adding some new useful stuff (like a community space for news,info and comments)
i will be on vacation in 5 days and wanna read about something new :)
So i'm considering asp.net webforms 4.0 because i have little to no knownledge of frontend languages. I know that is not considering good habit now,but i really do not wanna learn first html/css/javascript,it's just an hobby as i told you before
I've considered too Ruby on Rails 3.0,but i really hate TDD development idea and there is still the html-css-javascript problem
What can you suggest me ?
Sorry if this is not what you want to hear but I only have what you posted to go on and it seems like development is not for you. Programmers LOVE learning new technologies and playing with great languages. If you don't then find another hobby.
You start by saying essentially you have a basic idea of HTML. You want to write an intranet site. You don't want to learn HTML and CSS ?
But that's all a website is. The rest is just tools that enable you to product the HTML and css.
Perhaps you need to reconsider writing web sites ?
I've considered too Ruby on Rails 3.0,but i really hate TDD
development idea and there is still the html-css-javascript problem
Why would the fact that you hate TDD mean you can't use Rails 3? That just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.
If you have a real interest in this as a hobby then you need to learn HTML and CSS whichever tool you use to produce your application with.
TDD is good. Why do you hate it?
If you really hate learning new stuff then I guess you need to find a different hobby or choose a different solution to your intranet. i.e. non web based intranet.
Delphi, and .net platforms spring to mind but if you struggle with HTML you'll certainly not find object pascal or c# easy to pick up.
Best advice I can give you is don't do it.
Hobbies should be fun and you are really saying that you don't want to learn new languages like HTML, CSS, Rails etc...
If you really do want to do this then either bite the bullet and learn HTML/CSS as you develop your site using Rails 3 as this will handle all your database activities very nicely. You can add javascript when you feel more comfortable.
If you really don't want to learn how to write websites but still want to develop yout intranet which is pretty much what your question is saying, then try ruby, Delphi or .net and write a non web based intranet multi tier app.
Update based on comments below
Based on on your comment I strongly suggest you go with webforms. You are familiar with C# and the tone of your question is I don't understand Rails. Seems pretty much like you have made up your mind already anyway.
I'll just add that you should try these things for yourself rather than rely on opinions. You need to form your own opinion on what you like the best. Just make sure that opinion is based on fact. It worries me that you would think some of the things you have mentioned with regards to Rails.
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Closed 12 years ago.
I'm ASP.NET developer. I want to learn web development technologies and other languages than Microsofts.
I heard about two languages but I don't know which one is better or how to favor one over the other especially that clojure is new somehow.
Could anyone help me about why to choose one of them over the other?.
Thanks.
Ruby will obviously give you a better bang for your buck if your aim is to get things done and to reuse mature libraries. It must have one of the most vibrant ecosystem considering web development. The quantity of new stuff is big and, most importantly, the quality is often amazing.
It has a very nice package distribution system, and a number of tools which makes practical web development a breeze, at all levels.
In the heavyweights web frameworks you have:
Rails, which you have necessarily heard about. It is probably one of the best compromise today between big community and intelligent design. The other one would be django in my opinion but it is a python framework
Merb, which is a lighter alternative in the full blown framework department
And you have a ton of lighter ones, like Sinatra , which is probably one of the most elegant small web framework i have ever seen, or Camping, which is small and very fun to use.
This is only the beginning. Be it for ORMs, templating engines, or anything else you'd want to do with it web related, you have a ton of quality options.
On the negative side for ruby:
It is a very dense language, with a lot of things to learn, and a distinct inclination for "magic" constructs. It is quite beautiful, but it is far from the simplest language.
It is slow. If you want to do anything that needs performance, ruby is probably not the language you need. That may or may not be a problem depending on what you want to do with it
It doesn't have as many library for "regular programming" than it has for web programming, although it is clearly not the desert either. A language like python has a more wide range of libraries if you step out of web programming though.
Clojure is a very different beast altogether. It is a very new language, and it is entirely functional. If you never programmed in a functional style before, it may be a paradigm shift that will make you less productive for a while, but you will almost certainly learn a lot in the process.
It is also a lisp, and like with functional programming, it will probably mean a lot of new things to learn, but a lot of enlightenment at the end of the process.
It is a very elegant language, with a very vibrant community. It is also a lot faster than ruby, and it is only getting better with the new 1.2 version.
So on the positive side :
It is a clever language. Contains a lot of interesting ideas, notably regarding concurrency. It is not object oriented
It's fast for a dynamic language
It runs on the JVM, and has a very strong and easy to use interop system with Java. That basically means you have the whole Java ecosystem to your disposal.
On the negative side :
It is very new. That is not a disadvantage in itself, but is the reason for other troubles you might have with it along the way.
It has very few well integrated and thought libraries. This is the point that is the most detrimental in my opinion. You basically have everything you will ever need in java world, but the solutions may be ugly. You might want to code your own wrapper library in the process, but this takes time.
It is not like everything you know. It's not object oriented, it is not imperative, and it hasn't anything like classical C syntax. So depending on your other language experiences, it might take a long time to learn
So the summary is :
If you want to learn new things in a very comfortable environnment while having the possibility to build things very fast by leveraging mature libraries, choose ruby.
If you want to learn even more new things, you don't mind in totally new territory, eventually taking more time to do things, and you want to participate to a community that might be on its way to modify the way we think about programming, while hacking and having fun in the process, choose clojure ;)
Switching from ASP to Ruby is probably easier than switching to Clojure, also it has a larger community and ecosystem. However, if you are interested in functional programming and/or fancy concurrency features, you should give Clojure a shot.
Ruby is a nice language though I'm partial to the Django framework over Rails. One thing that I have found working with interpreted languages is their ambiguous implementation of threads. In both Ruby and Python the interpreter will only crunch though one thread at a time.
As far as clojure goes, think about how big the library will be when you try to use it. Coming from .Net you already have a huge lib. Python and Ruby are fairly mature at this point, and you can find most any extensions you could imagine. It is so easy to take a big library for granted until you don't have it. Before switching look at .Net nuke. Haven't used it but it's supposed to be model/viewer layer for .Net.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I have been using Grails for the past few months and I really like it, specially GORM. However, I am getting interested into Scala's Lift. Therefore, I would like to know your opinion about which kind of web apps are better suited for which of those two frameworks or it is just a matter of taste, which framework to use?
Finally, which of those frameworks do you think will be more used in the future?
I have the feeling that Grails is far from reaching a critical mass and it still remains very obscure (in the past few months I had the opportunity to work with middle size companies and IT startups working mostly with the JVM stack and only one person knew and used Grails) and I am not even sure if it can become the "RoR" of the Java world (Indeed reports a drop of growth in the last few months even if other frameworks have a positive growing rate). And I love Groovy, it is really easy to learn but I have noticed how slow it can be for some tasks.
On the other hand, Scala seems to be more popular (Tiobe Index) and the fact that Twitter is using it now gave it even more presence in the blogosphere with lots of lovers and haters making buzz. It is famous for being fast and scalable. However, the language seems somewhat hard to understand and learn for lots of developers (so maybe it will never gain mainstream status). Lift is little known and I have read some reports that it is better suited for small apps (less than 20 domain classes).
By seeing the number of books published Groovy-Grails dominate right now, but many publishers have Scala books on the works, so I think this advantage will not last long.
Finally, we have the problem that both languages and frameworks still have poor IDE support (it is getting better by the day but far away from what Java shops expect to be productive).
I do not want to start a flame wars, but I would be very interested to hear other users' opinions.
The accepted answer here takes a really ignorant view on Groovy - it is a modern, dynamic language (dynamic vs. static is a huge debate in and of itself, and not particularly relevant here). This is by design, and therefore not a disadvantage, just a difference. It has a lot of modern language features that Java does not have such as closures, native regexp, polymorphic iteration, some optional static typing (matter of debate, but also look at groovy++), native syntax for lists and maps, etc.- you can see a comparison here http://groovy.codehaus.org/Differences+from+Java
To address the actual question of Grails vs. Lift, I'd say Grails hands-down. It has the SpringSource behind it, and just look at the plugins page http://www.grails.org/plugin/category/all - I can't even find what plugins or equivalent are available for Lift. Grails is also on top of the latest cloud-friendly technologies, with features like native RabbitMQ messaging support, and turnkey GORM support for MongoDB and Redis.
Grails is a nice idea(but only "stolen" from rails) but the fact that the groovy guys are not interested in getting proper Eclipse support is hindering it's success a lot. I've even seen Eclipse questions not being answered at all on the grails lists.
I agree with Tim that Netbeans 6.7 finally delivers the first half way usable Open Source IDE support for groovy/grails - and eventually, SpringIDE will also feature better groovy/grails support.
The reason many Java folks love Java is the static typing, which enables tools to help you a lot with many things. This is lost with a language as groovy.
Yes, I could write every really important piece of Code in Java and still use Grails - but then, why should I, just to save a bunch of lines of glue code, do that instead of learning to use a Java framework highly effectively?
To come to an end: I did not yet look at scala, but built some simple apps with grails - and I tend to go back to java, even reimplementing every app that needs further development in a plain Java framework - I think wicket and Seam.
I'll also look at Scala/Lift, I heard many good things about it!
BTW: I'd compare communities and look at mailing lists - how many peope are there, do they get good answers on their important questions?
Grails seems to have a non-answered rate from nearly 50%, which I feel is bad.
Grails support in netbeans 6.7 is really good, as well as the idea intellij support in Maia.
Eclipse is still pretty sucky.
I looked at lift, but was concerned about the resources available now; this will change in the future, but my projects can't wait.
I would like to specifically answer the question "for which kind of applications". The main difference between the philosophies of Grails and Lift seems to be that Grails enforces MVC whereas Lift seems to be more liberal i.e. it doesn't enforce MVC but provides enough avenues to use MVC if you want to.
Also Lift seems to be excellent for 'Single-Page Applications', especially if you need to implement a server-push functionality using technology like Comet (which obviously doesn't imply it's not good for other types of applications). On the other hand, Grails seems to be better for the 'Enterprisy' applications, especially if you are already familiar with Spring and Hibernate but want your app to be much more concise (using Convention over Configuration) than what a non-Grails app would be using these technologies.
References:
Simply Lift, chapter 13
Single-Page Application
Disclaimer:
I have just started exploring Lift and built some simple apps using Grails.
With all the performance improvements and advancements of Grails2.0, with great support provided by IntelliJ 11 for the framework, an ability to plugin pretty much any advanced web technology into your grails app., and yes - VMware weight behind it - I really don't see how Lift could be an advantage or a good choice. Just think of using two different languages in the same application, need for double expertise in the team, etc.
The original question has been posted like 2+ years ago and I think time showed on which side is the choice of the dev community ;)
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm interested in building a site that has several interactive features for the users, yet want the site to be relatively light and avoid using Java or Flash. The site will start small but will hopefully be scalable. I realize developers tend to prefer a specific language and/or CMS and am wondering if you think a particular language would be best for creating a site with these features:
Short user profiles, photo upload, automatically generated thumbnails, a simple rating system, photo galleries, a blog section, ability to serve ads, user verification, polls, forms to enter contests, a taggable, searchable how-to library, a video library (using videos hosted on other sites)
I'd recommend you checkout Drupal CMS. Drupal covers almost all of your needs by means of drupal modules and/or drupal core itself.
Using drupal is easy, you don't have to be a programmer. Eventually you can hire a drupal programmer to take care of certain things that may not come with drupal or may not have any modules available. The other plus of a drupal programmer is that they are already familiar with the technology and can help you much more faster.
I would go for a python or ruby web application framework, say Django or ruby on rails, if this is going to be a single developer project it would probably make sense to leave it open on what framework to use - familiarize yourself with the frameworks and interview a wide variety of candidates.
Hire the best applicant and go for the framework of his/her choice - if he's any good, he can definitely tell why his choice is better than the other ones, not just claim that "it is" (or worse, it is the only one I'm familiar with)
wikipedia list of the frameworks
The best setup would be COBOL, with a UNIVAC on the back-end for storage and a vintage Enigma machine in between.
Or, alternatively, find the person you want to hire and let them decide. From the tone of your question, it would appear that you don't trust your technical abilities. What makes you think that you're going to get good advice from a bunch of random people on the internet?
Find a good consultant that has done work similar to what you're trying to do and let them decide on the tools. In the long run that will be the cheapest because paying someone to learn a new set of tools will be much more expensive than any other costs that might be associated wit ha particular set of software.
Any language will do the trick (although Prolog could be too tricky). Use what you know best unless you want a tradeoff for self-education in which case use the language you want to learn next.
I would recommend using Django framework which is based on Python language.
It's a tradeoff. "First with the worst" is a time-honored recipe for success. That would be PHP, huge first-place presence, cheap hosting, lots of existing frameworks, lots and lots of bad code. More sophisticated, in second place, would be Python. Yet more sophisticated, in third place, is Ruby. I'm not exactly sure where perl ranks in web development.
Note that you will tend to attract a slightly different kind of partner/developer/employee with each choice.
If it were me, I would go with Ruby plus a framework, perhaps RoR, unless one of the PHP CMS packages was really close to what I needed.
So much for opinions, here is a language and platform agnostic thing to consider: with the recent availability of cheap VPS hosting, you really can have any kind of site you want, yet you don't need to run your own machine room. It makes Java and the other JVM languages more attractive, I think.
If you want cost effective solutions then I will suggest you to go with LAMP. You will get almost all your required features in free open source scripts. Again the development of LAMP is comparatively cheap then ASP.Net.
By LAMP I mean Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
The hosting expenses of LAMP are also comparatively cheap.
There is no absolute answer; You will have as many answers than users.
Do not re-invent the wheel!
First of all you will need to define your wishes - almost done.
Then choose a product regarding to the price.
Finally, find a specific employee.
For your needs, you can look at:
joomla
sharepoint
eroom
openText
blog platform
framasoft, chapter CMS
Some thoughts:
I highly recommend against Drupal. My experience is that it is entirely too bloated to be considered less than obese (let alone light).
I've heard NOTHING good about wordpress.
Joomla has a good reputation, but it also has the reputation of having a higher learning curve (I've never spent real time with it). If you're hiring someone, however, this should be irrelevant.
Personally, my favorite systems in PHP are from EllisLab Inc. -- Expression Engine and Codeigniter. Both of these are very well written and generally lay a groundwork for reliable and maintainable code.
Ruby generally has the reputation of being simple enough to build in.
I would use caution with Python, because it is in the midst of a transition between incompatible versions and that could be hell.
I'd go for ASP.NET.. it's trivial to build the things you mention with WebForms, although I would go for MVC in a larger project.. just my 2 cents..
as far as hosting expences goes Windows and Linux is nowadays pretty much the same...