If you were going to found a web based start-up tomorrow, what stack would you develop in? I hear alot of discussion here and there of various web stacks on HN, but I haven't ever seen a comprehensive debate on their relative merits.
The best stack to use is the one you know you can build to a point of getting traction/profitable with. The toughest barrier to startup success is getting traction/profitable, not the stack you use. Technology, esp. in the realm of computers, works such that there is almost always a workable solution given enough time or money, both of which come a lot easier once you've solved the hardest barrier which I've just outlined.
I think if you're planning on building anything complex, the question is answered by whatever front-end framework you are most familiar with.<p>Anything complex will require back end services with may be written in whatever language/framework is best suited for the task. Tie it all together via REST and message queues and find the best solution to each problem.
GWT for client side code + Wicket for server generated markup / stateful pages + Google Guice + Hibernate (or MyBatis if you prefer a more low level but simpler API) + PostgreSQL. This does everything I need.<p>All the modern Java tooling goodness minus the J2EE nonsense.
I'm already doing a research on 3 big names in the web framework competition (Yii, Django and Rails), and would like to share my experience in a longer animated movie.<p>My observation is that it generally depends on what kind of people you work with (their experience and their geekiness matters the most), you prefer stability over bleeding-edge, what support you expect from the community, and more importantly, what the technical requirements are for your application.<p>The language itself (PHP/Python/Ruby/other.) has almost the least impact on what you should choose, in my opinion.<p>(The movie won't be available till next year, sorry.)
<i>If you were going to found a web based start-up tomorrow, what stack would you develop in?</i><p>Depending on the details, probably some combination of:<p>Groovy on Grails, Tomcat, HornetQ, CentOS Linux, PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcache; with the possibility of falling back to plain Java (or even going native with C++) if necessary for performance critical stuff. If absolutely necessary, maybe Thrift for cross-platform RPC.<p>Note: I'm not making any claim that this is objectively the best stack available in any universal sense. But it's what would be best for me, based on what I know and am productive in.
If you were to itemize the merits and pitfalls of each technology and how well each plays with the others, the list would get long quickly. The question can't be answered without knowing the problem and the people.
Maybe a good place to start is here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_f...</a>
LAMP with PHP. Not the best and everyone will have their opinions but it's what I'm most familiar with and what will get the job done the fastest. Everything else is secondary.
Honestly, it depends on the task, really.<p>I'm comfortable in a few languages / frameworks, and each has their merits. If I'm building something with a dataset that I think Django's ORM will work well for me, and having its admin will be a benefit, then Django it is.<p>If not, almost certainly I'd drop into Tornado + Jinja, and an appropriate backend store.<p>For some other tasks, PHP might be the right answer.<p>I'm doing a lot with Django right now, so I'm probably more fluent in it than anything else, but Tornado is really sexy. Kind of a toss up for me.