Ask HN: Best lang / framework to build something fast but scales too

1 pointsnshankar14y ago3 comments

I keep getting ideas that can solve my own problems, if converted into products / services and shown to the markets. The markets would shape them to survive or die fast.

I want to develop a website in roughly 7 days or less that can scale to million page views per month without change. I would host it on a AWS Micro. The site would have log-ins and shared message postings.

Please suggest the best suited language as well as framework to achieve this.

3 comments

3 comments · 2 top-level

Mamady14y ago· 1 in thread

I recently took on such a venture and opted for PHP with the Phalconphp framework.

It worked out in the end (I did it over a weekend, not a whole week), but I have to admit that Phalconphp is not very stable - it's only at v0.4. But it is VERY, VERY fast.

The truth is that there is no way you can learn a whole language AND build an application in a week. So pick your favorite dynamic language and then find a lightweight framework for it.

My picks for lang would be in this order: PHP, Ruby, Python, Javascript (Node.js)

nshankarOP14y ago

Your order sounds good. I was thinking on PHP, but it is thrown down by development community over the language and availability of frameworks, such as Rails.

kellros14y ago

I'd reckon most of the modern web frameworks can handle that (Rails, Grails, Django, Play, ASP.NET/MVC, PHP, Joomla etc.).

Even then it's not as simple as that, because you would need to have knowledge about the interals to tweak for optimal performance.

I'd say unless you are building something rather silly or are able to use multiple open source project from codeplex, github, sourceforge etc. that's still a long shot.

You will probably be better off modifying an existing CMS or similar system you are interested in to suit your needs. Even that will take you a while to go through the documentation to figure out what to do.

So I'd say, starting from scratch with a new language and a framework, what you are suggesting would be impossible. Even with experience and knowledge, 1 week is still a long shot (40 hours?).

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