Rapid Application Development tools for web based applications

Question

I want recommendations on an easy to learn tool or programming language to develop web based applications.

It should provide rapid application development (RAD), be cross platform and able to connect to various databases.

An example could be Ruby, TurboGears etc. Preferably open source.

Answer 1

Ruby on Rails is open source, very easy to learn, works with lots of databases, and designed from the ground up to let you rapidly build Web applications:

http://rubyonrails.org/

Ruby is the language, and Rails is the framework. The combination is very much RAD.

Answer 2

Somewhat related:

• Ruby or C# as First Web Development Language;
• Which web-development language is best for a C programmer?

Your question is a little too broad. Basically there are lots of platforms out there that are Web-oriented, including PHP, Python/Django, Ruby and even Java or C#/ASP.NET. Each has particularly merits or reasons why you might choose one over the others in certain circumstances.

Personally I recommend PHP as having an extremely low barrier to entry, being cheap to host, easy to run (just install something like XAMPP on Windows and you're good to go) and is highly flexible. But other platforms can work well too.

Answer 3

You could go with Mono (an open-source *nix version of the .NET development platform; you know, Unix, Linux, etc). Language: C# (very Java-like). There's an IDE: MonoDevelop.

[http://www.mono-project.com][1]

Answer 4

RAD but not Open source :(

Morfik

Delphi For PHP

Answer 5

Doesn't the answer heavily depend on your hosting requirements? Are you willing to buy a dedicated server? Shared hosting? Cheap as possible PHP account?

Answer 6

3 years in php, but i wish i studied RubyOnRails instead. 90% of programming is about data validation & database access.