A big project

[mike.novecento]

Hi everybody,
I am going to start a new company in a little while. The company will
be founded when the first project will be in the alpha version. Several
other projects will be done in future. My problem is determing what
platform I should use.

I know how to program in several languages but ignore this for the
moment.
I am going to start a big project like blogger.com, flickr.com,
cragilists or something like that. The fact that the project will be
(hopefully) popular implies security issues and application
stress/scaling issues as well.
For these reasons, I need to be very careful on the choise of the web
development platform. I have 3 candidates:

- PHP
- Ruby on Rails
- ASP.NET

My aim is SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT, LOW TIME TO LEARN THE TECHNOLOGY and
APPLICATION STRENGHT (to security and to scalability issues).

Could you tell me what do you think of these 3 technologies for my
needs. I am tempted by Ruby, but lots of people says it is not mature
enough. Php, they say is not so secure and robust. ASP.NET I need 2
years of study and 4000 pages, for doing an hello world (ok I am
overestimating ).

Can you help me? Tell me your comments?

Thanks in advance,
Mike

PS: THANK-YOU, it is very important for my future the choise of
platform for my company.

 

[Phlip]

For these reasons, I need to be very careful on the choise of the web
development platform. I have 3 candidates:

- PHP
- Ruby on Rails
- ASP.NET

My aim is SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT, LOW TIME TO LEARN THE TECHNOLOGY and
APPLICATION STRENGHT (to security and to scalability issues).

Which of those three make unit testing DIRT SIMPLE?

Forget about tool support, or libraries, or encryption. Your web server will
provide the low-level security. For mid-level security, and scalability, you
need the ability to change your code as you site grows. For each change, you
need to know with absolute certainty that the change did not regress a
feature, did not introduce a bug, and did not change a feature in a way that
opened up a back-door.

You need unit tests on every feature, preferably on every line of code,
written at the same time as the tested code. Run them between each tiny
change, and if they fail Undo that change. No more debugging.

This implies, the quality of your debugger should be irrelevant. MS products
tend to support crappy languages and libraries with expensive and elaborate
debuggers. Make these things obsolete.

Now hit Google to look at the testing topology for those three offerings.
Only Java does more (and believe me you do _not_ want to try Tomcat).

 

[David Heinemeier Hansson]

Could you tell me what do you think of these 3 technologies for my

needs. I am tempted by Ruby, but lots of people says it is not mature
enough. Php, they say is not so secure and robust. ASP.NET I need 2
years of study and 4000 pages, for doing an hello world (ok I am
overestimating ).

Considering that you came here to ask this question, I'm going to
assume that you're looking for validation of your desire to use Ruby
on Rails more than anything. So here it comes:

Yes. Ruby on Rails will deliver the productivity, ease of learning,
and "application strength" you desire.

Since you should be in amble position to evaluate the first two
personally, I'll offer a few URLs to convince you of the last:

http://www.basecamphq.com/
http://www.backpackit.com/
http://www.43things.com/
http://www.43places.com/
http://www.odeo.com/
http://www.strongspace.com/

The sites all fall within the category of your references and they're
made with Ruby on Rails. Many of them do more than 400K pageviews per
day. I know at least one of them is nearing one million.
--=20
David Heinemeier Hansson
http://www.loudthinking.com -- Broadcasting Brain
http://www.basecamphq.com -- Online project management
http://www.backpackit.com -- Personal information manager
http://www.rubyonrails.com -- Web-application framework

 

[Mike Novecento]

Thank you David. You are actually one of the few names of the Ruby
world, that I already now... your fame proceeds you.

Mike.

 

[Alexandru Popescu]

#: (e-mail address removed) changed the world a bit at a time by saying on 9/15/2005 8:06 PM :#

Hi everybody,
I am going to start a new company in a little while. The company will
be founded when the first project will be in the alpha version. Several
other projects will be done in future. My problem is determing what
platform I should use.

I know how to program in several languages but ignore this for the
moment.
I am going to start a big project like blogger.com, flickr.com,
cragilists or something like that. The fact that the project will be
(hopefully) popular implies security issues and application
stress/scaling issues as well.
For these reasons, I need to be very careful on the choise of the web
development platform. I have 3 candidates:

- PHP
- Ruby on Rails
- ASP.NET

Don't want to change your mind but I was asking myself why python is not included, instead of php.

:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.|

 

[Ezra Zygmuntowicz]

Hello Mike-
You definitely need to make an informed decision about which
platform to choose. I recently went through the same decision making
process when I was tasked with creating a complete rewrite and
redesign of <http://yakimaherald.com>, for the newspaper I work for.
The old site was written in PHP and I already have around 5 years of
PHP experience. But I was very attracted to ruby on rails. I made a
few smaller client projects with rails and have been very impressed.
So after weighing my options I decided to go with ruby on rails. I've
already written up the dev process quite thouroughly here :

<http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.ruby.rails/20637>

I hope maybe that helps you get a little perspective on the
scalabilty and stability of rails. Using ruby I was able to write
this app in under 1500LOC in less than 4 months and I am the only
developer here. The app gets around 50,000 hits a day right now and
the server is not even breaking a sweat. I'm running it on a dual g5
Xserve and it averages out to using around 16% of one cpu right now
at the most heavily trafficked time of the day. So I have no doubts
about the scalability of ruby and rails. It uses the shared nothing
method of scaling. So once I max out the current xserve, I can just
add another and it will almost double my capabilities.

HTH-
-Ezra Zygmuntowicz
Yakima Herald-Republic
WebMaster
<http://yakimaherald.com>
509-577-7732
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Mike Novecento]

Thank you Ezra. Very Helpful.
I am thinking to go for Ruby...

Mike

PS: For Alexandru: Zope is complicated, and the other web frameworks
for Python faint against Ruby on Rails for as far as I know. Otherwise
yes, Python looks pretty good too...

 

[Eric Hodel]

http://www.43things.com/
http://www.43places.com/

The sites all fall within the category of your references and they're
made with Ruby on Rails. Many of them do more than 400K pageviews per
day. I know at least one of them is nearing one million.

Our sites (combined) handled over 1 million requests due to a naughty
spider for a couple days.

 

[Alexandru Popescu]

#: Eric Hodel changed the world a bit at a time by saying on 9/16/2005 8:13 PM :#

Our sites (combined) handled over 1 million requests due to a naughty
spider for a couple days.

Have you solved it? I would be very interested to find out how. Can you post some hints how can you
protect against these spiders?

thanks and sorry for this question that might be considered a little offtopic.

:alex |.::the_mindstorm::.|