Choosing a platform
Last month my friends and I had an idea of a website startup. I can’t share the details right now but it will be a free service website and I don’t know how to make money out of it yet. But that’s what makes it fun. Even if it’s not gonna be successful, what’s important is I tried and I learned from it. Anyway, my friends are gonna work with me on this, they liked the idea as well. One of the preliminary decisions was choosing the right platform for our current situation. Here are my thoughts and options:
- Ruby - Ruby on Rails — while this is what I wanted the most, it’s just not possible right now. We couldn’t find a hosting service that we can afford for this. And we’re all currently beginners on the language so we’d most probably be crawling all the time when working on the project.
- ASP.NET - ASP.NET MVC — this one looks really tasty as well. We have strong skills in ASP.Net development and some of us has already worked on the new MVC platform for ASP.Net but the general feedback is it just isn’t quite stable yet. For the hosting there shouldn’t have been a problem at the start cause we know of a hosting service that’s cheap enough for startup websites. Of course, it will be quite expensive if the site grows.
- Python - Django — I read a lot of recommendations about this one. The problem is I don’t know much about Python, much more on how to deploy one. I would
- PHP 5 — it’s going to have to be this one. PHP’s one of the easiest to deploy and from what I see is the cheapest in terms of hosting requirements. Also most of us already know PHP so there shouldn’t be any problem there. We’re choosing between Kohana or ZendFramework for the framework. It’s more fun to start the project from scratch but it’s gonna take longer to develop so I don’t think that’s gonna be one of our options.