Subj : Re: A big project
To   : comp.programming
From : Randy Howard
Date : Sun Sep 18 2005 11:54 pm

mike.novecento@gmail.com wrote
(in article 
<1126808007.593869.248250@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>):

> Hi everybody,
> I am going to start a new company in a little while. 

Translation: You have no business plan.  good luck.

> The company will
> be founded when the first project will be in the alpha version. 

Why not found the company first?  You have zero employees, and 
only want incorporation for legal protection of yourself?

> Several other projects will be done in future. My problem is determing 
> what platform I should use.

Since you have not defined anything concrete about what you plan 
to build (in enough detail to help anyone), it's easy to see why 
you have this problem.

> I know how to program in several languages but ignore this for the
> moment.

Ok.

> I am going to start a big project like blogger.com, flickr.com,
> cragilists or something like that. 

Translation:  You want to run a popular website, but you have no 
idea what it will be about.  These things don't happen by 
accident.

> The fact that the project will be
> (hopefully) popular implies security issues and application
> stress/scaling issues as well.

Yes, and it's bigger than the work of one person that knows 'how 
to program' (whatever that really means in this case) in several 
languages.

> For these reasons, I need to be very careful on the choise of the web
> development platform. 

I agree with that.

I have 3 candidates:
> 
> - PHP
> - Ruby on Rails
> - ASP.NET

You're looking too far down the stack.  There are dozens of CMS 
systems out there, which have hundreds of developers, that have 
a ton of real experience with the above languages and more, yet 
you want to roll one from scratch, and somehow magically avoid 
security problems by choice of language instead of strength of 
design.

> My aim is SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT, LOW TIME TO LEARN THE TECHNOLOGY and
> APPLICATION STRENGHT (to security and to scalability issues).

TANSTAAFL.

> Could you tell me what do you think of these 3 technologies for my
> needs. I am tempted by Ruby, but lots of people says it is not mature
> enough. 

Given that you seem to be willing to take the word of total 
strangers for something that you think might be 'huge' for you  
down the road, without looking into it yourself tells me that 
the thing that's not mature enough is sitting in your chair.


Save yourself a ton of time, and actually have a chance of 
getting something out the door in your lifetime.  Take a look at 
Drupal, Xaraya, Plone, Joomla, Xoops, etc.  Do test installs and 
build some content, test, etc.  Get a feel for what has done 
before, even if you insist upon reinventing the wheel.  If 
nothing else, you'll have a list of things you don't like and 
don't want to replicate.

> PS: THANK-YOU, it is very important for my future the choise of
> platform for my company.

Not really, what is important is having a solid plan that makes 
financial sense, technical talent appropriate for the company 
product roadmap (which would appear after the business plan), 
and the experience and monetary horsepower to make it happen.  
Conducting opinion polls in Usenet newsgroups in order to make 
serious technical decisions impacting a startup is a sign of 
impending doom.

-- 
Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR)

.