Hi,
I constantly find myself in a rattle between languages, technology and solutions when trying to choose a good "background" for designing and developing a business web application.
What is the best approach to web programming in this situation? What technology, language and solution could be used in developing and maintaining a modest business web application?
Thank you!
Seems the more I learn things, the more I see a convergence. I see the MVC style of project development gaining popularity in both PHP and .NET apps. jQuery seems to have become the standard for most sites, be they .NET or PHP. And CSS is slowly gaining a consistent balance between multiple different browsers.
In all honestly, I don't feel as torn today as I did years ago when I first started learning contrasting technologies. The more I learn, the more I feel comfortable enough jumping between languages.
The only pressure I feel today is in the environment I would like to work in. If I want a big corporate job, my chances are better going with .NET/C#. That isn't to say you can land a nice-paying job working with Open-Source technologies - you can, and I have. Either way, you're going to wind up learning the central tenets of web-development regardless what language you land on.
Learn all you can, and can all you learn ;)
I am a .net guy and have been since the platform was released. I have been using the new ASP.NET MVC platform that was started a year ago and I must say that I love it! It is very flexible and allows me to do things the way I want too rather than the way MS wants me too. The .NET language in general has a great deal of flexibility in that it can be used on many platforms and for many purposes (not just to build a website). The key here as to whether or not it is a good fit for your company generally starts off with "are they a Microsoft shop - or not". If they are then .NET is generally a good fit. If they are not then there is probably a good reason for it that you are not going to be able to change in which case the LAMP stack may work better for them (not necessarily you though!). This is sort of a vague question so that is the end to my vague answer!
Whichever language/technology/solution gets your application to market the quickest with a good amount of available talent in your region. Whichever language/technology/solution is priced best for your target market.
Answer those two things first, and if it's still a toss-up then realize that .NET, LAMP, technology X, it doesn't really matter. What users will care about is that the application meets the need they are looking for. Time is money, and time to market is key.
Good Read from Paul Graham:
http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html
... Lately companies have been paying more attention to open source. Ten years ago there seemed a real danger Microsoft would extend its monopoly to servers. It seems safe to say now that open source has prevented that. A recent survey found 52% of companies are replacing Windows servers with Linux servers.
More significant, I think, is which 52% they are. At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don't. ...