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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...
Related
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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.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm building a new game and I need to build a web app to help manage content generation. The app would consist of a couple simple forms that would tie into a MySQL db.
I've been really interested in learning Lua for a long time due to it's large popularity in the video game industry and was wondering how well it works as a server side language. I could easily write the web app in PHP but I'd rather use this opportunity to learn Lua if it makes sense.
What do you all think?
Cheers,
Sure it can be done. Good idea if you just want to learn Lua. You should start here: http://www.keplerproject.org/
Of course, if your app would consist of a couple simple forms, you can use all what you want. But if it is more complex (will become more complex in future) it will be better to use some industry standard languages like Python or Ruby (or, at least PHP), there are a lot of good frameworks writen in them that very simplify your work (I don't know about any complete lua web frameworks) .
You should remember, that in future other people will have to maintain your code and there are very few web-developers who know Lua.
Probably, there will be problems with documentation and basic libraries too.
While LUA is a nice language for embedded development but i would extremely vote against LUA for web development.
The reason is that in Games you simply don't have an external API. All is done with your own objects only some calls into your game engine.
But the web world is so full of stuff you need, like SMTP, POP3, IMAP, SSL, Amazon APIs, Google APIs, RSS Apis, Imaging etc. and while the checklist for LUA may have a check mark behind all this words - it doesn't mean anything. Most of the stuff i have seen is just a "me too| implementation but not industrial strength. They are projects by hobbyists and are published on a "Its good enough for me" basis which is total unacceptable if you ever go mission critical.
There is a reason why it takes years and a huge community to get this up. Lua has an extremely small community of web developers.
So if this is a professional project where you put your money i can only say hands off. On the other side if you have enough money i still have some snake oil here for sale, please contact me.
I have been using lua for years as a web language. Initially using the Xavante project and more recently apache2.
Dont listen to any neigh sayers, its a great language for web developement and we use it to write business software, and not just for form processing, for graphical applications too.
Also it offers us seamless integration to any other lua or system functions we might need to call.
Good Luck!
Have a look at Nanoki which is built on a pretty minimal set of libraries (lfs, luasocket, lzlib, slncrypto)
and Sputnik which is built on Xavante or CGI
Lua is a good language but it is best suited to embedding within an existing project in order to quickly extend the capabilities of that project. In particular, the interesting aspect comes with how you bind it to the host application. This is definitely the case when programming for games where it is an embedded language rather than the language the whole app tends to be written in. So using a web app to learn about Lua with a view to making games is probably not a very good approach, especially since the syntax is very simple and would be picked up quite quickly anyway.
I think that specific variants of lua can be used successfully for web applications and I have done that in the past using the maintained weblibrary. It can depend on if the lower level software on the computer is itself written in lua because of its high speed and this may cause a clash of lua versions. Regarding a serverside possibility the server would need a compatible version of the script developing facility for the hardware and a suitable bytecode or VM instructions and custom VM runtime implementation for running the application.
I've been developing a pure Lua Web Server, you could always check it out and see if it suits your needs
Lua4Web https://github.com/schme16/Lua4Web
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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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This question is not about which is the best, it is about which makes the most business sense to use as a company's platform of choice for ongoing freelance development.
I'm currently trying to decide what framework to move my company in regarding frameworks for web application work.
Options are
ASP.NET MVC
Django
CakePHP/Symfony etc..
Struts
Pearl on Rails
Please feel free to add more to the discussion.
I currently work in ASP.NET MVC in my Spare time, and find it incredibly enjoyable to work with. It is my first experince with an MVC framework for the web, so I can't talk on the others.
The reason for not pushing this at the company is that I feel that there are not many developers in the Media/Marketing world who would work with this, so it may be hard to extend the team, or at least cost more.
I would like to move into learning and pushing Django, partly to learn python, partly to feel a bit cooler (all my geeky friends use Java/Python/c++). Microsoft is the dark side to most company's I work with (Marketing/Media focused). But again I'm worried about developers in this sector.
PHP seems like the natural choice, but I'm scared by the sheer amount of possible frameworks, and also that the quality of developer may be lower. I know there are great php developers out there, but how many of them know multiple frameworks? Are they similar enough that anyone decent at php can pick them up?
Just put struts in the list as an option, but personally I live with a Java developer, and considering my experience with c#, I'm just not that interested in learning Java (selfish personal geeky reasons)
Final option was a joke
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.shtml
As you said for the media/digital marketing sector php is the way to go.
I love .Net (it would be my first choice if the target market wasn't a factor).
I would really look for good well rounded developers regardless of their tech or market as opposed to ones with "media/digital marketing sector" experience.
It is possible to find good/experienced/reliable developers with knowledge of multiple frameworks. If this is a requirement, it is of course possible to vet candidates accordingly.
Given that you're referring to freelance development, it would probably make sense to add the dimension of "where the developer is based" into your thinking, as dealing with someone who's a stone throw's away compared to dealing with someone abroad or another city may affect how you work together. This means that where you are based also affects your choice: if you're based in a small town, there will be less quality canditates close to you with suitable skill sets.
I'm currently learning Symfony for myself, and work as a freelance advisor/product developer for a site that's built with CakePHP. Although an experienced PHP developer should be able to make the leap from one of the above to the other quite quickly, there's a fair amount of framework-specific intricacies that can only really be learnt by coming across the problem and then searching for the solution, or by being guided by someone who already knows. Symfony is considered to have good documentation, but I feel that there's a quite a lot in it that's also not in the documentation and that can really only be learnt by doing it.
I also worked for a company quite recently who used Symfony, hired high-quality PHP developers only, and if I recall correctly, it was about a month or two for new guys to get familiar with the code and the workings of Symfony, and start becoming properly productive.
Hope that helps.
In my (heavily biased) opinion, Django is gaining some traction in this sector. Off the top of my head I can think of a number of high-profile news organizations that are making significant use of Django and I've seen reports of organizations utilizing Django for putting up special one-off sites quickly for unique coverage of special events or circumstances. I know firsthand that PBS and National Geographic also use Django extensively for their web properties and I understand Discovey Channel does as well. There is a nice testimonial about how Michael Moore's site was rebuilt quickly using Django: http://blog.concentricsky.com/2009/10/michaelmoore/. I'm not sure if MSNBC has begun utilizing Django internally, but they did acquire Everyblock.
A few others I'm aware of that use Django heavily:
Mahalo
NASA
University of Texas
I've also seen that Django is being used by startups outside the media sector so I wouldn't say it is specialized toward a particular business sector. There are a lot of organizations out there that have been sort of silently using Python internally over the years and so Django is quickly becoming a natural option for web-based services. Python actually has decent roots in the scientific communities, financial sector, and I've spoken with a number of people in the entertainment industry who use Python in their digital effects / post production pipelines.
Maybe not the most riveting content overall, but there is some good info in here: http://djangocon.blip.tv/file/3041158
Look at your clients. Frameworks are just tools, you will have to go with the tool that suits the particular job. This also means your choice to dive into a framework will choose your future clients.
Many SMB shops need PHP because that it is the easiest to host and is interoperable on many layers of "platform" (not just OS, but also supports all DBs etc.)
ASP.NET MVC: I heard a lot of awesomeness about it, I like C# as well. But I can't afford to go only with the options Microsoft provides (database for example) and Microsoft products only really support they own stuff.
Django: Expected to gain huge momentum, but I'll wait until the language itself (syntax) becomes stable.
CakePHP/Symfony: CakePHP is very easy to pick up and is a good choice if it fits all the requirements.
Struts: Quite heavy, I would learn Spring (MVC) instead.
Pearl on Rails: Haven't really used/seen it, so no idea.
You could also consider to learn a framework that is radically different from you current knowledge.
So I love Symfony. It does all I need for a Framework to work fast and clean.
The structure and the architecture is pre-defined so everybody knows where to put stuff, so you can easily work together with a whole bunch of developers.
I would never chose CakePHP over Symfony, because if you have to make changes to a model, you can never again generate code after the development has started.
CakePHP just overwrites everything.
I sure lost all my code a few times. Really annoying.
Symfony just extends the generated code and that is where you develop.
Here you find a good discussion about CodeIgniter (with which I develop at the moment, and it is no MVC and PHP4-based) and Symfony: codeigniter-vs-symfony
The learning curve is a bit steeper for Symfony, but it has enough complexity for all situations I ever encountered.
My next project will again base on Symfony 1.4. And if you can wait, there will soon be Symfony 2.0
ASP.NET MVC, but only if you can use both a frontend and a backend developer for each project. It'll probably be harder to find developers with both competences and you might have to push .net-developers a bit to get them to use MVC.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm planning on creating a social networking + MP3 lecture downloading / browsing / commenting / discovery website using Ruby on Rails. Partially for fun and also as a means to learn some Ruby on Rails. I'm looking for a social networking framework that I can use as a basis for my site. I don't want to re-invent the wheel.
Searching the web I found three such frameworks. Which of these three would you recommend using and why?
http://portal.insoshi.com/
http://www.communityengine.org/
http://lovdbyless.com/
It depends what your priorities are.
If you really want to learn RoR, do it all from scratch. Seriously. Roll your own. It's the best way to learn, far better than hacking through someone else's code. If you do that, sometimes you'll be learning Rails, but sometimes you'll just be learning that specific social network framework. And you won't know which is which...
The type of site you're suggesting sounds perfect for a Rails project. If you get stuck, then go browse the repositories of these frameworks. Who cares if you're reinventing the wheel? It's your site, your vision, your rules.
If you just want a site up and running, then I would pick Insoshi or LovdbyLess simply because they're out of the box apps so you'll have to do less to do get running. I suggest trying to install them both, and introducing yourself in the Google Groups. That'll give you a good indication of wether you're going to get along.
Update: Insoshi's license has changed to the MIT license, which means you're basically free to do with it as you please. But still, review the license for any code you are considering before you get too invested in it.
Something to keep in mind when deciding is the license for the code. Insoshi is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, http://insoshi.com/license. This means that you have to distribute the source code to your Insoshi-based web application to anyone who uses that web application. You might not want to do that, in which case you'll need to pay Insoshi a license fee (they dual license, like MySQL).
LovdByLess is distributed under an MIT license, http://github.com/stevenbristol/lovd-by-less/tree/master/LICENSE. This means you can use the source code however you want to.
I've not worked with these but am aware of this comparison:
"Unlike Insoshi and Lovd By Less, which
are full social networking Rails
applications, Community Engine is a
plugin that can add social networking
features to existing Rails
applications"
from
http://www.rubyinside.com/community-engine-rails-plugin-that-adds-social-networking-to-your-app-901.html
Regarding RailsSpace, that's a very nicely built Rails 1.2 application, and I think it was updated for compatibility with Rails 2.x. There's even a terrific book that was written about the RailsSpace application (or rather, RailsSpace and the book were written together).
But, RailsSpace became Insoshi, when the authors were so inspired by the amount of interest in a social networking site built in Rails. So while RailsSpace might be an interesting learning exercise, it's dead in terms of development. All of the authors' efforts (for more than a year now, I think) have been going into Insoshi instead, so that's where you should be looking.
Another option for anyone who wants to create a social site without having to build it from scratch is the EngineY framework. EngineY is a social networking framework written in Ruby and Rails. It provides alot of popular social networking features such as activity streams, groups, photos, message boards, status updates, events, blogs, wall posts, integrated twitter feeds, and more. EngineY is also under active development with new features being added all the time. You can read more about EngineY and download it from: http://www.enginey.com
Use Rails 3 and roll your own. Don't copy and paste code though, look through the source and try to understand the reasoning or motive behind certain design decisions, only then will you learn.
Just a quick update, EngineY now supports Rails 2.3.5 and just released this weekend is support for themes. This goes along with existing features including groups, blogs, photos, REST API, status updates, Facebook Connect, forums, private messages, user profiles, activity feeds, wall posts, and more... Check it out at http://www.enginey.com or on GitHub at http://github.com/timothyf/enginey
One other positive to Community Engine is that it is using Engines which is an advanced type of plugin that is becoming a part of rails in 2.3. So what you learn from using Community Engine (and therefore Engines) will be useful going forward.
i'm currently testing both lovdbyless and insoshi. i was able to install and get insoshi up and running fairly quickly whereas lovdbyless is giving me a harder time.
if you're in novice mode, i suggest getting the book from Head First.
http://www.headfirstlabs.com/books/hfrails/
it is probably one of the better books out there for beginners. atleast in my opinion because i went through a few that was just way too confusing.