Ask HN: If you had to remake ratemyprofessors.com, what would you write it in? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: If you had to remake ratemyprofessors.com, what would you write it in?

4 pointsdzlobin13 comments

I chose the website as an example because what I'm working on would be laid out in a very similar way, and we're not quite sure what to code it in. That said, what would you write it in? Thanks in advance

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I'd go with ASP.NET MVC. Probably one of the less common answers you'll get here, but I think if you choose one of the more popular and well-supported options (Rails, Django, ASP.NET MVC, Java) you won't really go wrong.

Just check out each one and pick the one you feel has the best fit for your coding style. A properly-built site will separate the coding from the style, so it won't really matter what's underneath.

Thanks for the sound advice, now it's time to test it all out.

I'd second ASP.NET - whether you use the MVC framework or just plain old ASP.NET is up to you.

Me? Rails. You? Any mainstream framework. Whatever you want. It won't be a highly technical app so it doesn't really matter, and any mainstream framework will have the functionality you need. Be wary of anyone saying "[x framework], for sure." Whether a project like this succeeds or fails will have nothing to do with the framework you choose.

Agreed. But my reply was more than just "for sure". I explained why I thought that.

Django, for sure.

The docs are awesome, and it's getting momentum. It's simple to get started(the admin feature provides you free CRUD), runs on sqlite that's bundled with python >2.5 and it's written in Python :-)

I've been thinking about this, I suppose I'm going to definitely put that on the possible list. Thanks!

Is anyone familiar with cakePHP? Would that have any benefit here?

If you're familiar with PHP, then it would have the benefit of a low learning curve. Otherwise, I'd go with something else...what kind of web server are you going to use (Linux or Windows?)

I'm familiar with PHP, so I'm not terribly worried about learning a new framework. I'm just curious what it can bring to the table

I'm not too familiar with CakePHP, but there's also CodeIgniter. I found this fairly detailed comparison when I did a bit of searching:

http://snook.ca/archives/php/codeigniter_vs_cakephp/

If you want a bit of templating functionality without using an entire framework, I sometimes use a less-well-known PHP templating system called Smarty (http://www.smarty.net), which is very easy to get the hang of, and it's just as fast as using pure PHP (because Smarty actually converts your templates to plain PHP code).

Thanks I'm going to look into it, as well as smarty, which looks really helpful right now

CakePHP runs the whole framework codebase on each request. It's actually over a hundred times slower than rails (!).

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