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Comment by twelvedigits | Hacker News Reader

This is a great idea. In general, I think there's great potential in anything that connects developers with other developers to provide reviews of software.

Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year. There was no information. I'm sure these API's have been used thousands of times, but developer has written a review. So I'm left making decisions off marketing pages and PR-driven blog entries. Implementation takes hours that I don't have, I just want a trusted review.

It's really dry territory. You can do well here.

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> Recently, I tried to research some of the new CMS/API platforms that have been released in the last year.

For APIs, there is a great resource: http://www.programmableweb.com/apis

For CMSes, there is a dedicated website: http://www.cmsmatrix.org/

Alternatively, you can search GitHub for CMSes from this year: https://github.com/search?q=CMS+created%3A>2013-11-07

I'd especially love that for eCommerce systems as well. They require a bit more of a commitment than a CMS (at least that is the usual case).

Right now, the only mature ones I know of are all PHP based :/.. I hope that's just me missing something though.

Not really. At least e-commerce has a pretty capable incumbent (Shopify).

CMS is an interesting case, though. There are 4-5 companies trying to take on WordPress. I could go with the incumbent, but I'd love -- LOVE -- some real dev reviews of that stuff.

Like, where's the fucking unboxing video for developer software?

Can you mention which 4-5 companies you think are doing a good job of taking on WordPress? I can only think of one or two, off the top of my head.

Maybe "doing a good job" is an overstatement at this time. These companies seem to be taking shots at the CMS component of Wordpress:

https://www.contentful.com

https://prismic.io

http://osmek.com/

https://buildwithcraft.com

The top three ecommerce platforms are all Java based (hybris, Oracle ATG and IBM Websphere) and there are a ton of "tier 2" platforms that are cover the .net and PHP stacks. The tier 1 systems will cost you a significant amount of money to get up and running though (over a million $ is not uncommon).

If you only know of the PHP platforms then I guess you don't play at any significant level in the industry (like most people on HN).

This is actually a candidate for shit hn says.

For other than startups, this provides nice gallery of idiocy:

"Look, this is how many external Saas-dependencies we have and we have no control over our service."

Just saying, because it is one thing to use open source and totally different thing to rely on 3rd party services.

Only in software industry do we still fee this way! For e.g. Can we imagine a car delivered to us without involvement of any third party components?

Why do we feel software always has to be built from scratch or use free (open?) stuff? What is wrong in software being built on credible third party services?

Perhaps the sign of a mature industry is when such credible third party partnerships become the norm...

I reckon the main issue is reliability. In your example of car delivery, if one driver is unavailable, there's gonna be a replacement. You could argue that if one datacenter goes down there'll be another, but those too can fail - see also the Amazon outage last year or whenever it was. And unlike a car delivery, these 3rd party suppliers (like AWS) will severely impact your business if they fail.

Of course, so would a power outage. So IDK, there's pros and cons, as with everything.

My analogy was to depict a car company and not a single individual's car. As in software company using third party services has the same business risks as a car company using third party services.

My view point was not from a single individual using the product but from the manufacturers view point.

Personally I'd be more wary of startups that have few external dependencies, because it likely means their trying to do too much that is outside of their core competencies and/or not spending as much time as they could be on their unique value proposition.

Sure you can run your own centralized git hosting for your team. Do you really think you could do it better and more reliably than GitHub? Especially for less than $7/mo? And sure you can probably run your own instance of postgres, but how confident are you that your backups are going to be there when you need them? And that it'll be up as much as a dedicated instance of Heroku Postgres? I can probably count the number of people more experienced and qualified than that team (wrt running Postgres) on my fingers and none of them are going to run your database for $50/mo.

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