Which technologies are commonly used by developers to quickly build websites?

Question

I'm an experienced C/C++/C#/Objective-C desktop,web, and mobile programmer and I've become accustomed to building most of my software from scratch. I've built all my websites from the ground up using ASP.NET. I have quite a few ideas for websites that I'd like to test and I'd like to increase the rate at which I can actually build a website. I'm sure I'm unaware of many of the technologies that are commonly used for building out ideas quickly. About a year back, I looked into using the popular CMS called Drupal to see if it would help me speed up development. After two weeks of trying to decipher the structure of the Drupal CMS, along with trying to learn PHP, I found the learning curve to be steep enough to convince me that it would just be faster if I built my website yet again from scratch using ASP.NET MVC. I'm wondering if anyone could suggest any other technologies that are designed for programmers to build websites quicker than my current method of building them from scratch using ASP.NET MVC.

Secondly, I've been hearing many entrepreneurs mention Ruby on Rails is what they use to speed up the development of their ideas, so I'm planning to investigate it. Why do I hear more about Ruby on Rails than any other technology? Would you suggest using it to speed up development?

Thanks in advance for all your wisdom!

Answer 1

Use an ORM for the data layer. That will increase the speed.

Also reuse common code elements from your previous projects.

And still, for any more or less different site you would need to do some work. Cannot avoid that. ASP.NET MVC is quite powerful tool, especially because it's backed up by the rich .NET class library. At least this framework doesn't build you obstacles at any step along the way, which is quite an accomplishment.

Answer 2

Django is a framework for database-driven web pages in Python.

Answer 3

I agree with your assessment. I was rather proficient in C/C++/C# and never built a website before. I looked at a couple of things, but when I started working with ASP.NET MVC2, I loved it. Another method/architecture I like but haven't messed too much with is WPF. If you download Microsoft Expression Blend 4 there's a 60 day trial and it's really nice. A lot of clicking and less typing. :) Hope this helps.

Answer 4

I toyed with the Zend PHP Framework a bit, and found it to be pretty good. You mentioned that the learning curve for Drupal/PHP didn't make it worthwhile to pursue, but if you retained any of the PHP you learned from that, this might go a bit quicker. To read more you can check out "10 Compelling Reasons to Use Zend Framework". Zend might not exactly be "configure and you're done," but since I usually work with Enterprise Java, I found it pretty reasonable in the speed-to-set-up department.

Answer 5

I've tried out Ruby on Rails, Django (the Python equivalent of Ruby on Rails) and Drupal. Drupal is nice if you're just acting as a sysadmin: install the modules you want and use it as-is. But PHP as a programming language is so annoying that I'd hate to use it for something serious.

Django has some odd quirks but seems to work well. From an MVC perspective, Django calls views "templates" and calls controllers "views", which is ugly. Also, instead of generating default URL -> controller/action mappings for you the way that Rails does, Django set up routing files by hand before things work. You also have to set up some DJANGO environment variables if you want to run other helper Python code with access to your model objects. Rails also creates and configures a sqlite database by default so that you can start right away, but with Django you have to set it up yourself.

Rails seems to "just work" in so many ways that I highly recommend it. Ruby is also a pleasant language to work in. Try the simple startup to see what I mean:

rails foo # Create the foo webapp
cd foo
script/server

Then browse to http://localhost:3000 to try things out. That page will give you some info about your webapp and point you to the next steps.