Stipple went with Rails for the sole reason that we were able to iterate and release very quickly in the beginning when I was the only one coding on it, and my

Stipple went with Rails for the sole reason that we were able to iterate and release very quickly in the beginning when I was the only one coding on it, and my expertise is in Ruby and Rails. We're now heavily Backbone-based on the frontend, however. You should use what you're most comfortable with, as being able to iterate quickly is most important at the start of a project. As mhd says, the backend is really more important. We're using MySQL, Redis, Cassandra, and a custom Erlang/mnesia based store in ours. (full disclosure - I'm Stipple's co-founder and CTO)