Rapid Web Application Development ASP.net vs. Open Source Platforms

Question

Good morning -

I'm an intermediate-level developer who wants to build on online data-driven app (CRUD with a few calculations and basic HTML form inputs, nothing fancy) that keeps track of user sessions, and looks "professional" (or at least not "homemade").

I'm looking to develop something with the look-and-feel that users get from sites like:

• http://www.datamasher.org/
• http://www.thisweknow.org/ (About page says it was made with Ruby on Rails, which I'm unfamiliar with)
• (stackoverflow.com)

Any pointers on whether I should just go the Miscrosoft route, and develop in ASP.net with WebForms, or if there's a quick way to do this kind of development (with a WYSIWYG environment) on an open-source platform? If so, I'm willing to learn, if it's somethat intuitive, and I can use to quickly drag/drop, add code, and publish online. Templates would be a plus, too - I'm not a heavy HTML/CSS developer.

I apologize is the question seems a bit vague.

Answer 1

If you go ASP.NET route use ASP.NET MVC. It is very robust platform. It also depends on your skill set as to which technology to pick.

Answer 2

Is this a personal project or a professional one? If you use ASP then you'll have to host on a microsoft server (which isn't free) that is one thing to consider. If you use Ruby on Rails you can use Heroku (free while you're small).

It also depends on what the purpose of the app is. if it is to get something out there as quick as possible, and you have experience with ASP, then use that. I use Ruby on Rails and find the online support fantastic (props to stack overflow) as well as a large number of plugins and gems you can integrate make development pretty straightforward. Every AustinOnRails meeting i go to, i hear more and more .NET people wanting to jump ship and move to Rails, though this is based on an availability bias.

If you had no experience on either, I would suggest RoR since it is free to deploy, open source, and has an extremely active community. I would recommend the Agile Web Development with Rails book if you want to learn Rails.

Aside from that, its really your call.

Answer 3

Rapid application development is not used for building sites you have mentioned. For RAD, there are tooling support inside VisualStudio, like GridView controls, DataSets, SqlDataSource and similar. That's rapid development! But with that approach, you're loosing most of things that was important in building sites like this, and those you mentioned.
For building cool new, web 2.0 sites, you have to do lot of things "by hand", and you need framework that gives you control over page rendering. From request, through business logic execution, database requests, to html rendering process for which you must have absolute control!
Frameworks like Rails (Ruby), Django (Python), ASP.NET MVC (with c#, Ironruby, ironpython,... and some ORM frameworks) are made for that. If you're familiar with asp.net, you should look at asp.net mvc and community around it! But in my experience, there is no quick, rapid way for building sites like stackoverflow, no matter which framework you choose!

Answer 4

Use the Open Source ASP.NET MVC Framewrok, is easy and powerful