Help choose web application framework for academic project

Question

Hello people,

I'm about to start an academic project related to rich internet applications. I thought that using a web application framework will save me some time and allow me to better structure my code. I've spend the last few days in searching for the best solution.

There are certainly lot of choices and I'm basically lost.. I'm equally good in programming in PHP and Java and have knowledge of JavaScript as well. I would like to use a framework that has good support of RIA technologies and HTML5. I have experience in Joomla development but CMS is a different case.

What would you suggest for my case?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Choose a good MVC framework for PHP. CakePHP, Zend, CodeIgniter, and Symfony are the industry leaders.

Answer 2

While you could consider one of the many questions concerning PHP frameworks, I would (as I always have) recommend CodeIgniter for the beginner, the intermediate, and the expert PHP developer.

Answer 3

Grails. If you are already familiar with Java, Spring, Dependency Injection, and Hibernate it will save you a lot of time. Grails promotes MVC architecture and convention over configuration. Groovy is very easy for Java devs to pick up.

Answer 4

If you're primarily interested in client-side, rich internet development, you might want to look at SproutCore, which is a Javascript/HTML5 MVC framework that runs client-side.