Bobo72
11-05-2007, 03:55 PM
Hi,
Despite having developed small web applications for quite a few years by now, I've never ever dug that deep into php, done only a bit of ASP (a/o using a simple MVC-framework) and only just scratched the surface of .NET.
Most recently, I've begun developing in Ruby on Rails. Admitted; Rails is a truly agile framework. However, I'm somewhat frustrated about the high degree of abstraction that Rails builds upon. I actually find that if you really, really want to develop Rails applications, you still have to know what goes on under the hood - and then the learning curve increases significantly ...
But - to get to the point, I'd like to hear some opinions from this forum's users: If you were to really master one server-side language / framework, what would you choose. Or actually; if you should choose one language or framework that you could master just enough to be able to build server-side services (e.g. REST) that your frontend in e.g. Adobe Flex could consume - what would you choose? Something more enterprise-oriented like .NET / MonoRail for instance - or something more open source-oriented like Rails or Django?
Of course this all depends on a myriad of choises, variables and personal preferences. It's just that I'm a bit frustrated: In Rails I thought to have found a really productive environment that was easy to get started with, to learn and to develop in. The problem is; each time I run into problems, it seems to be a million times more difficult to locate the source of the problem than e.g. when I was doing ASP, mainly due to the high level of abstraction in Rails - and the way that most code is 'encapsulated' and 'hidden' from you ... ASP may be old-fashioned and produce spaghetti-code, but at least it is easy to debug as you more or less have to write everything yourself?! But maybe that is the paradox when it comes to frameworks: You are given a lot from the beginning - but if you really have to exploit the full potential of the framework, then you have to learn much more about how the framework is build than it appears from the beginning.
Hope and look forward to hear some opinions - that may affect my own choice regarding what to start digging more deeply into.
Cheers,
Bo
Despite having developed small web applications for quite a few years by now, I've never ever dug that deep into php, done only a bit of ASP (a/o using a simple MVC-framework) and only just scratched the surface of .NET.
Most recently, I've begun developing in Ruby on Rails. Admitted; Rails is a truly agile framework. However, I'm somewhat frustrated about the high degree of abstraction that Rails builds upon. I actually find that if you really, really want to develop Rails applications, you still have to know what goes on under the hood - and then the learning curve increases significantly ...
But - to get to the point, I'd like to hear some opinions from this forum's users: If you were to really master one server-side language / framework, what would you choose. Or actually; if you should choose one language or framework that you could master just enough to be able to build server-side services (e.g. REST) that your frontend in e.g. Adobe Flex could consume - what would you choose? Something more enterprise-oriented like .NET / MonoRail for instance - or something more open source-oriented like Rails or Django?
Of course this all depends on a myriad of choises, variables and personal preferences. It's just that I'm a bit frustrated: In Rails I thought to have found a really productive environment that was easy to get started with, to learn and to develop in. The problem is; each time I run into problems, it seems to be a million times more difficult to locate the source of the problem than e.g. when I was doing ASP, mainly due to the high level of abstraction in Rails - and the way that most code is 'encapsulated' and 'hidden' from you ... ASP may be old-fashioned and produce spaghetti-code, but at least it is easy to debug as you more or less have to write everything yourself?! But maybe that is the paradox when it comes to frameworks: You are given a lot from the beginning - but if you really have to exploit the full potential of the framework, then you have to learn much more about how the framework is build than it appears from the beginning.
Hope and look forward to hear some opinions - that may affect my own choice regarding what to start digging more deeply into.
Cheers,
Bo