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This is a newbie question :-) Wasn't sure if StackOverflow or one of its sister sites would be a better place to ask, but thought I'd go ahead anyway here first.

A friend and I are toying around with an idea for a photo-sharing service. The service would be heavily mobile centric (uploading/sharing/viewing pictures from your phone), but will have a website component also. Our backgrounds are almost entirely in mobile software development, although we both have some Java (J2SE) experience.

This is not a super urgent thing for us, so we're willing to spend some time learning a new language/platform if necessary.

The fundamental question for us is what would be best for building a service like this? At a very high level, our basic requirements are:

  1. A web-service API by which users can upload/retrieve/share/manage pictures from their phone-based applications

  2. A spiffy website where they can do the same - in terms of responsivity/interactivity, we'd like it to be similar to flickr or tumblr

Right now, we're being faced with a Java vs. Ruby vs. PHP decision. One part of me wants to get going in Java so that we can have an implementation up. But on the other hand, I don't want to discover too late that it's not the most optimal and have to throw away and restart - like I mentioned before, we're willing to invest the time/effort to learn something new before kicking this off.

The major constraint for us is money. We're Mac-based and don't want to invest in a Windows machine just to be able to try ASP.NET - hence discounting that even though we can get free licenses through BizSpark.

So what I'm requesting for is advice based on your experience or stuff you've seen in the past - please do share!

Mods - Please retag as you see fit.

Cheers -seenu

The most linked "Java vs. Ruby vs. PHP" discussion we've seen on the web is this CMSWire article describing a talk given by Tim Bray.

We're also looking at this post for some guidance.

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Thanks to all for the great advice...we're going to start experimenting with ("fooling around in" is more apt ;-)) Django and Rails. We're thinking that we'll pick a simple problem (1-2 weeks) and one of us will use Rails and the other Django and compare notes when we're done. Special shout out to Jesper for the exit scenario advice. – Seenu Mar 17 '10 at 3:22

4 Answers

up vote 3 down vote accepted

First things:

  1. The qualities of the platform matter much less than the qualities of the people. There are no (major) platforms so crappy that it justifies throwing out all code and starting from scratch.
  2. Skilled developers with lots of experience on the platform is the best predictor there is for successful development.

Regarding "starting from scratch", I could imagine a few rare situations -- extremely rare indeed -- where codebases written in the slower languages (Ruby, Visual Basic) could justifiably be re-implemented in faster languages to save on machine time. Taking an existing codebase in the other direction, from C#/Java to Python/Ruby is not something that I have ever seen done.

There is only one other potentially strategy-changing issue that I can see, and that's exit scenario. Youtube was built more or less to be flipped to Google. If you know beforehand who you want to buy your company, then pick the platform that integrates best with their existing infrastructure. But how often is this known beforehand...

So in your current situation, I would suggest that you use whatever webapp framework for Java you're most familiar with now.

If you really want to play around first, then consider looking at Python (Django or Turbogears) or Rails, but expect to throw the first version out. If you choose a non-Java framework, then it should largely be determined by your personal tastes, i.e. which language and framework 'feels' best for you.

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up vote 3 down vote

I'm a Python guy, so I say Python/Django is the way to go. Of course the ROR crowd will say that Ruby is the best choice, the PHP coders will think PHP is best, and I think you can see the pattern. The truth is any of these languages will be capable of doing what you need to do.

If you really want to learn a new language and/or framework I would suggest either Ruby on Rails or Django. Both have an active and helpful community, and at least on the Django side the documentation is good (I haven't looked at the ROR docs). Keep in mind that with a framework you're learning both a new language and a framework, so it will take longer than if you're just learning a language.

On the other hand, if this is a business venture I'd say go with what you know. Get a prototype done and get some feedback from your users. What language have you used for mobile development?

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@Jacob - thanks for that. Our bread-and-butter development for the past year has been iPhone/Android/RIM, so there's strong Java knowledge on the mobile side. Previous to that, we've been doing Symbian, Windows Mobile and embedded Linux, so that primarily C. – Seenu Mar 16 '10 at 18:20
It doesn't sound like you'll have much trouble learning anything. If time really isn't an issue for this project I would go ahead and learn Python or Ruby. You won't save time on your first project, but future projects will certainly be faster. Abhay makes a good point comparing the two. When I made this decision I chose Python because it is used for many things besides web development. Ruby seemed to be used primarily for web development. – Jacob Mar 16 '10 at 19:33
up vote 1 down vote

If you want fast, iterative development, my recommendation is to go with Python or Ruby. These are much faster to work with, offer a pleasant but powerful environment and are OK in terms of performance. Java is possible but I find my progress to be much faster in Python/Ruby.

Regarding Python vs. Ruby, I see advantages and disadvantages of both. Python has a bigger community and a larger number of libraries but Ruby on Rails is just a awesome solution for webapps with everything packaged nicely and ready to go.

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up vote 0 down vote

Yes, repeating. Your skills are more important than the platform..

If you desire a framework, why not consider Grails?

Groovy is very familiar to java type developers (here are the differences) , and Grails was originally named groovy on grails.

Definitely worth looking at given your background.

Good luck!

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