How do you decide between different emerging technologies?

Question

I'm facing developing a new web app in the future and I'm wondering how to decide what framework to use. I've settled on Python as my language of choice. But there are still may frameworks to choose from! More generally how do you choose between different similar technologies that are still in the works as the latest round of web frameworks are? I'm curious what your process is for deciding on technologies you've never used.

Answer 1

Recognize that no choice is perfect -- or even very good.

No matter what you choose, someone will have a suggestion that -- they claim -- is better.

No matter what you choose, some part of your tech. stack will fail to live up to your expectations.

The most important thing is "shared nothing" so that the components can be replaced.

After that, the next most important thing is automatically-generated features to reduce or prevent programming.

Look at Django. Lots of automatic admin features make life very pleasant.

Answer 2

There are a number of things you can do:

• Download the frameworks and build something similar with them for comparison.
• Look for comparisons by other people, but attempt to understand the bias of the reviewer.
• Observe the community at work, see what people are building and the issues they run into when using the technology. Forums, blogs, mailing list etc are good places to check out.
• Go to conferences and meet like minded developers interested.

You can also take the approach of using stable versions rather than alpha bits. After a while you might move closer the bleeding edge. People associated with the project in question are generally more biased than those approaching from other platforms, be careful who you trust.

Consider the impact of using a bleeding edge framework versus an established one. Sometimes it's important to your customers that you are on one perceived as stable. At other times this doesn't matter. How comfortable are you with fixing the framework itself? Great developers will learn the internals, or at least know enough to keep things moving whilst a bug is sent to the framework mailing list etc.

Consider some general best practices in building abstractions and reusable code on the python platform. You may be able to save yourself some work in moving to another platform. However, don't be a reuse junkie as this can limit the effectiveness of your use of the framework. The 37Signals guys are right when they talk about extracting frameworks from working code rather than building frameworks from scratch.

Answer 3

Experience trumps hearsay. I've found that prototyping is a huge help. Make a prototype that uses the features you expect to be the most important for various frameworks. This helps route out any features that may not work "as advertised."

In general though, kudos for being willing to look at new technologies.