Most robust language for websites?

14 replies
When I want a website designed I'm faced with choices of platforms and languages. A php programmer will say that PHP is the way to go. A Ruby on Rails programmer swears it's better. The ASP programmer says other languages are toys. etc. etc. I don't know who to believe.

If I want a site coded that will start out small, but needs to grow and scale over time, what is the best platform / language in your opinion?
#language #robust #websites
  • Profile picture of the author Scott Ames
    Maybe this answers my question: From FaceBook... That's a scale I know I'll never exceed...

    Facebook is one of the most-trafficked sites in the world and has had to build infrastructure to support this rapid growth. The company is the largest user in the world of memcached, an open source caching system, and has one of the largest MySQL database clusters anywhere. The site is largely written in PHP though the engineering team developed a way to programmatically transform PHP source code into C++ to gain performance benefits. Facebook has built a lightweight but powerful multi-language RPC framework that seamlessly and easily ties together infrastructure services written in any language, running on any platform. The company has created a custom-built search engine serving millions of queries a day, completely distributed and entirely in-memory, with real-time updates. Facebook relies heavily on open source software and releases large pieces of its own software infrastructure as open source. See Facebook Engineering | Facebook and Open Source - Facebook Developers.
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  • Profile picture of the author wayfarer
    Choose an engineer, not a programming language. The most robust language is whatever your programmer is an expert at.
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    • Profile picture of the author Scott Ames
      I guess, but some languages seem to have more faults and troubles than others. That's what it seems like to me.
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  • Profile picture of the author wayfarer
    That may be so, but valid arguments can be made for any platform. Facebook's choice of PHP originally had more to do with the freedom of the platform than anything else. It wasn't until later (when they had money) that they started optimizing it by converting it to C++ (that project is called "HipHop for PHP", and they've released it as open-source). Facebook could have just as easily been developed in say, Python, or .NET, or even something like Coldfusion, or Java, or whatever.

    PHP was probably the original choice because that's what they knew how to do best, and the hosting software was free.

    Cost and availability is always a factor, but if you're developing enterprise-level software, there are many good choices, and it's more important that you have a good team that knows what they are doing than anything else.

    I personally started using PHP because it was the most readily available to start learning, and it's fast enough to meet just about anything I need to develop for the web. But PHP is very slow compared to just-in-time compiled code like Java or C# when it comes to executing complex calculations, which is why Facebook invented HipHop.
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  • Profile picture of the author unnatural
    Even though PHP is slow compared to JIT (just-in-time) compiled code, you can't really write user-friendly web applications using Java or C# etc., so for it's purpose PHP works pretty well.

    Personally, I'm a big fan of PHP and absolutely hate working with ASP. Python is nice but the community support is lacking and it's kind of out-dated these days for front end web apps. On the other hand Ruby on Rails is very powerful and you can create apps fairly quickly if you know what you're doing.

    To be honest, unless your dealing with HUGE numbers any language will have more than enough performance *if* the programmer writes efficient code and sets up databases properly.

    Code optimization is a huge topic and so is database optimization, but again unless you're dealing with millions of visitors a day and/or millions of records in a database even non-optimized code will usually do the trick.

    So as wayfarer said, choose a good engineer/programmer and you won't have any trouble regardless of the platform.

    One other thing to note however is that LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, php) setups are generally cheaper than windows servers which are required for .NET/ASP.
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    • Profile picture of the author michael_gourlay
      Originally Posted by unnatural View Post

      Even though PHP is slow compared to JIT (just-in-time) compiled code, you can't really write user-friendly web applications using Java or C# etc., so for it's purpose PHP works pretty well.
      I find Java to be a great language to use for writing web applications. Why do you think it's not possible to write user-friendly web apps with it?
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  • Profile picture of the author SUPER Louie
    You should try a Java Framework called Groovy and Grails. Its codes are very robust. It's a combination between Java, Python, Perl, and PHP
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  • Profile picture of the author ussher
    which language is better: French, German or Chinese?

    It all depends where you want to go.

    Same with programming languages.
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  • Profile picture of the author SebastianJ
    When building web apps I always go with Ruby on Rails, it's just so ridiculously good to work with.

    I've done a lot of C#, Java and PHP development over the years. When it comes down to sheer productivity and actually enjoying what you're doing - Rails is unbeatable. Ruby is a great language, Rails has an awesome community and Open Source-support and the combo is just pure awesomeness. Yeah, I'm a Ruby/Rails fanboy heh...

    The awesome thing is that you can run Ruby on top of the Java RVM as well if you want better threading support and speed. And if you really, really want to improve speed (and do not want to run your stack on JRuby/Java) you can always replace core components of your stack with C equivalents (like Facebook did) or like Twitter did, with stuff written in Scala (or wait, Scala runs on the JVM as well).
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  • Profile picture of the author wayfarer
    JRuby is way slower than Scala from what I've been told. As far as I know, Scala is the only language written for the JVM that actually approaches the speed of Java. It's because Scala's inventer actually used to work on the JVM when he worked at Sun Microsystems.

    It might sound like I'm knocking Ruby and Rails, but I'm really not. It's been hugely influential, just look at all the PHP frameworks that are basically based on RoR ideas.
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    • Profile picture of the author SebastianJ
      Originally Posted by wayfarer View Post

      JRuby is way slower than Scala from what I've been told. As far as I know, Scala is the only language written for the JVM that actually approaches the speed of Java. It's because Scala's inventer actually used to work on the JVM when he worked at Sun Microsystems.

      It might sound like I'm knocking Ruby and Rails, but I'm really not. It's been hugely influential, just look at all the PHP frameworks that are basically based on RoR ideas.
      Yeah, Ruby on Rails pretty much brought back MVC into the web dev world again. Even though you aren't a ruby developer a lot of php frameworks, asp.net mvc, django etc. are based on the principles that Rails use.
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  • Profile picture of the author leppozdrav
    Choose an engineer, not a programming language. The most robust language is whatever your programmer is an expert at.
    I accept this. Choose a programming language which will grow with you. Take java, It evolves day after day. Apps built before 10 years with java 1.2 has evolved to java 1.6 application. As the language improves you app aslo improves.
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  • Profile picture of the author odehfehr
    In my opinion ASP.net is best for a website creation. because ASP.net is a platform independent we can run any application in .net platforn. In addition, ASP.net provide predefine frame work, with the help of this frame work we make our site more attractive and professional. we can also add css template in website. so ASP.net is a best for website creation.
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    • Profile picture of the author SebastianJ
      Originally Posted by odehfehr View Post

      In my opinion ASP.net is best for a website creation. because ASP.net is a platform independent we can run any application in .net platforn. In addition, ASP.net provide predefine frame work, with the help of this frame work we make our site more attractive and professional. we can also add css template in website. so ASP.net is a best for website creation.
      I did 3-4 years of C#/ASP.NET consulting and I was so, so fed up with it. It sucks so fkn hard.

      ASP.net has nothing on Ruby on Rails (or comparable mvc-frameworks like Django etc.). When I dropped ASP.net in favor of Ruby on Rails it was like going from a crappy volkswagen to a ferrari.

      If you're stuck with ****ty Microsoft products/frameworks, at least go for .NET MVC. ASP.NET is just insanely horrible.
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