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If you haven't done anything with web before (I mean, no working sites developed and running), this deadline seems unrealistic and you should start negotiating

If you haven't done anything with web before (I mean, no working sites developed and running), this deadline seems unrealistic and you should start negotiating to extend it considerably. All your mentioned choices are good, it depends which language you'd like to associate yourself in the future more often than not. If it was my first project, I'd start from scratch though, learning framework and it's conventions without this experience might lead to sloppy code as you haven't been exposed to the bottom layer of technologies you're working with yet. This is not the same as saying "learn asm before you go up", web ain't that difficult to understand, you'd be much more well rounded developer by learning the bottom layer first. Also, for me, learning a framework properly takes a long time reading the docs, mailing lists, forums, it might not be a good move to learn framework under a deadline. If you do decide to build a mini-framework and code library for this yourself, I'd recommend looking through Kohana [1] PHP framework. Very readable and clean code, not over engineered to the point where it's impossible to understand it for a junior developer. For python, try web.py. [1] http://kohanaframework.org/ http://kohanaframework.org/

gyardley 15y ago
I can confirm that Kohana's code is very readable, which is good, because the documentation itself is sometimes lacking and there's not a ton of good resources and tutorials for learning it. While this sounds a little off-putting, it's actually (surprisingly!) a benefit - as a beginner you'll get used to digging under the hood and learning how your framework works, and you'll come out a better programmer for it. By the time you run into something your framework can't do, you'll be in a pretty good position to simply extend it. (And Kohana is very easy to modify and extend.) That said, it might take you a bit longer to get going than it'll take you to get going on some other framework that does a better job holding your hand. The way I see it, you're gambling. If you use a better-documented framework, and if the documentation and tutorials out there for it cover everything you want to do in your app, you've got a better chance of hitting your deadline - but if you run into something the framework can't easily handle, you're hosed. While it takes a lot longer to really understand what's going on in your framework, you'll be able to then deal with unexpected problems as they arise. If you do decide on Kohana and have some questions, I'm in NYC and am also a beginner - email me.
swah 15y ago
Folks are recommending Flask these days, because IIUC web.py has stopped. I only had good experiences with Flask, and you're productive in a couple hours.
- karolist 15y ago
  Thanks, I'll be sure to check Flask out

gyardley 15y ago

I can confirm that Kohana's code is very readable, which is good, because the documentation itself is sometimes lacking and there's not a ton of good resources and tutorials for learning it. While this sounds a little off-putting, it's actually (surprisingly!) a benefit - as a beginner you'll get used to digging under the hood and learning how your framework works, and you'll come out a better programmer for it. By the time you run into something your framework can't do, you'll be in a pretty good position to simply extend it. (And Kohana is very easy to modify and extend.) That said, it might take you a bit longer to get going than it'll take you to get going on some other framework that does a better job holding your hand. The way I see it, you're gambling. If you use a better-documented framework, and if the documentation and tutorials out there for it cover everything you want to do in your app, you've got a better chance of hitting your deadline - but if you run into something the framework can't easily handle, you're hosed. While it takes a lot longer to really understand what's going on in your framework, you'll be able to then deal with unexpected problems as they arise. If you do decide on Kohana and have some questions, I'm in NYC and am also a beginner - email me.

swah 15y ago

Folks are recommending Flask these days, because IIUC web.py has stopped. I only had good experiences with Flask, and you're productive in a couple hours.

karolist 15y ago
Thanks, I'll be sure to check Flask out