What is Web Development?

What platform can a system programmer use for web development?

• Me & my friends are planning to build a web service. Everyone in our team are embedded system programmers (C/C++) & don't know much about the latest web development. Which is a good platform (ex: Ruby on Rails) for web development? We need something that is scalable, efficient, easy to debug & maintain code. We are not worried about learning a new programming language/platform since it should be fairly easy for us. The web service will have lots of videos & web pages. We will probably use MySQL for database. If we have to pick one thing that we care most is scalability.

• Answer:

  I suggest these two: 1. Django (Python) 2. Ruby on Rails (Ruby) We need something that is scalable, efficient, easy to debug & maintain code Scalability: Both Ruby on Rails and Django are scalable. But when you are talking about scalability, there are too many variables specific to your application than framework. Efficiency: Rails has lot of "magic" via "Convention over configuration". Therefore sometimes it becomes hard to know what exactly is going on. Rails "magic" makes it efficient to write application quickly. However, Ruby is not considered as "best performing" programming language. Python is faster. Debugging: Write tests, lots of it. Unit tests, functional tests. Do Test Driven Development. That will help a lot. We are not worried about learning a new programming language/platform since it should be fairly easy for us A language is more than syntax. Ruby has a philosophy behind it (the ruby/rails way). So, please take care that you don't write rubyfied/pythonified C/C++. So the rule of thumb is: If you prefer configuration over convention, use Django (python). If you prefer convention over configuration, go for Ruby on Rails.