Learning about solution stacks

[Robin Green]

Hi, I want to understand what motivates web developers' choices for their eventual software solution stack.

I'm particularly interested in personalized social network sites.

Why would one developer choose LAMP over OpenACS?

What kind of questions do you need to ask yourself when you're deciding what software bundles you're going to use?

Can you have any combo of operating system, server, database and script that you want at all, or are there certain ones that work much better in combos?

I'd be really pleased if someone could direct me to somewhere I can read up on all of this and get some more clues.

(In terms of doing, I'm only just learning html, but I want to understand this stuff better.)

Thanks
Rob

[ray326]

Why would one developer choose LAMP over OpenACS?Because he has a requirement that doesn't fit the OpenACS framework. LAMP is a generic application stack, not really a domain-specific framework.
What kind of questions do you need to ask yourself when you're deciding what software bundles you're going to use?Which of these best satisfies my requirements, both functional and non-functional?
Can you have any combo of operating system, server, database and script that you want at all, or are there certain ones that work much better in combos?Yes and yes. In general the greatest advantage to the well known combos like LAMP is the fact that they are well known. A larger user community will produce the best help and the greatest number of canned solutions and examples.
I'd be really pleased if someone could direct me to somewhere I can read up on all of this and get some more clues.You basically have to learn about each one at a time. There are very few places where you'll find unbiased comparisons.

[Robin Green]

Thanks,

What kind of questions do you need to ask yourself when you're deciding what software bundles you're going to use?

Which of these best satisfies my requirements, both functional and non-functional?

So, you really have to find out everything about those different packages and how they would work together before you decide. And what is a non-functional requirement? I can only think of functional ones.

A site that I admire is Meetup.com and I've been trying to find out what they used and why, but I can't find anything, whatever searches I do. It's really easy to find out about Facebook and other similar sites and what they used, why's that? Do meetup want to keep it secret so people won't copy them?

I'm at such an early stage that I appreciate the advice about doing what's well known, that makes sense. I was thinking about learning Python - after I've got my head round html. Would that be a good first one to start with? I am doing this on my own so everything I'm learning is just what I've read online, so it's difficult to sort out the biases.

Thanks again.
Rob

[ray326]

So, you really have to find out everything about those different packages and how they would work together before you decide.Yes, unless you're already constrained by the following.
And what is a non-functional requirement?Things that don't directly apply to the business process like requirements to use specific technical infrastructure pieces like MySQL or a specific programming language like Java or to adhere to certain specifications like HTML 4.01 Strict. Those have nothing to do with the use cases that define the functional (business application) requirements but they're important in other ways.