If you absolutely need scalability and don't mind a Google lock-in, check out Google App Engine. It can run Django, app-engine-patch makes this extremely easy.
Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
11–20 of 36 posts
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#12If you absolutely need scalability and don't mind a Google lock-in, check out Google App Engine. It can run Django, app-engine-patch makes this extremely easy.
Yup! I've tried it. But they don't yet have a payment system. Their product roadmap says that the pay-as-you-go system will kick-in sometime in March 09.
EDIT: AppEngine product roadmap: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html
Due to this I'll have to stick with some host like Slicehost or Linode for now and then maybe switch later when the requirements increase.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#13Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about. Worry about the business model. If you get the business model right, and you have scalability problems (i.e. "Oh shucks there are too many people trying to pay me money!"), then you can just pay to get them resolved.
Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices. My current product is paid, and I have contemplated making it free while trying to catch the revenue off the ads, but given that scaling the web site will take work now whereas the ad payback may or may not come later I chose not to do this.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#14If you absolutely need scalability and don't mind a Google lock-in, check out Google App Engine. It can run Django, app-engine-patch makes this extremely easy.
Yup! I've tried it. But they don't yet have a payment system. Their product roadmap says that the pay-as-you-go system will kick-in sometime in March 09. EDIT: AppEngine product roadmap: http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/roadmap.html Due to this I'll have to stick with some host like Slicehost or Linode for now and then maybe switch later when the requirements increase.
Google reps hinted on the appengine user group that they are very likely to introduce some kind of payment system this year.
In the mean time, you can ask them for a quota increase if your app reaches the limit.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why but I just like using variety of languages. I enjoy the learning different stuff. After 3 years with PHP, I developed an app for a contest a while ago on Google App Engine using web.py. That was my first shot with developing a python web app. I'll give Django a try later. But since my web app deals with developing for plugins go blog engines, I guess I have to deal with some Python blog engines too.…
IMHO, knowledge of multiple languages is usually a sign of a _good_ programmer. Keep at it.
make sure to learn the canonical style of the languages, not just the syntax and grammar. it is the difference in attitudes and approaches that yields insights that will carry with you from one situation to the next.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#16You might want to revise your choice of languages. Common Lisp is as expressive as Python or Ruby, but many times faster. Haskell and OCaml are even better.
Clojure is another option; theoretically you have all of Java's web frameworks, and Java is also faster than Python or Ruby. I can't recommend it, since I haven't used it yet, though. (I don't want to be a Clojure fanboi ;)
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#17Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about. Worry about the business model. If you get the business model right, and you have scalability problems (i.e. "Oh shucks there are too many people trying to pay me money!"), then you can just pay to get them resolved.
Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices. My current product is paid, and I have contemplated making it free while trying to catch the revenue off the ads, but given that scaling the web site will take work now whereas the ad payback may or may not come later I chose not to do this.
"... Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices ..."
To the point where you have trouble getting more users. MySpace is the classic study here. How do they scale all those windows servers? ~ http://www.baselinemag.com/index2.php?option=content&tas...
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices. My current product is paid, and I have contemplated making it free while trying to catch the revenue off the ads, but given that scaling the web site will take work now whereas the ad payback may or may not come later I chose not to do this.
"... Lack of scalability will nag at you and may prevent from making some choices ..." To the point where you have trouble getting more users. MySpace is the classic study here. How do they scale all those windows servers? ~ http://www.baselinemag.com/index2.php?option=content&tas...
This is only a problem if your business model is based around selling poorly performing lower-than-remnant-inventory CPM advertising to users who are largely a) poor and b) disdainful of spending money except on iPods, which famously do not need CPM advertising to reach your users.
Not to toot my own horn here, but my (very, very boring) website makes about ~$80 for 1,000 pageviews. It is built on Rails. Supposing I totally screwed the pooch and it was structurally incapable of doing more than 100k page views a day without a top-to-bottom rewrite.
Suppose I got to that $8,000 revenues a day and figured "You know what? This is too darn constraining. I WANT MORE, BWAHAHAHA". I'd be able to hire whomever I pleased to do the rewrite (pay $5k a day for my own ops team, who cares, I can afford it). And it would be vastly easier scaling my site than Myspace/Twitter can scale theirs, because I would not have to set world engineering records to do so.
The first response any engineer is going to make is "Erm, you should probably think of putting multiple web servers in front of a beefy database rather than running both web server and database out of a machine with 256 MB of RAM." This is a pretty easy engineering problem compared with "OK, innovate technologically to be able to handle data on a scale that 5 years ago would have required a major multi-national corporation or minor nation state to generate."
Then I'd be back to the boring-as-dust business of, you know, providing features to convince my customers to continue paying me money.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#19I'll give my top recommendation for each language you named. I have used all 3 of these with great success. I have also used competitors for each of them. * PHP - Kohana * Python - Django * Ruby - Merb I used many PHP frameworks a while back and eventually settled on CodeIgniter (which is very good). After Kohana spun off from CI, it began to gain advantages and has continued to. I've used Pylons and TurboGears befor…
Coolio!
Wow! I've now got Merb on my http://localhost:4000
I installed Ruby On Rails too. Will see which one of them I'm gonna love.
Now it's playtime to get some code of my own.
I also read a lot of reviews about merb. All being great. Incase if someone else wants to know why merb is good for web apps that expect to handle a lot of processing and traffic even for a small amount of users. It seems that merb has a smaller core called the merb-core while RoR has a slightly bigger core. While RoR has some features built-in merb has those too has plugins/helpers. So I don't think there's much difference as along as you want your app to be a bit faster on the processing side.
Re: Ask HN: Scalable framework for web apps?
#20Scalability is the last thing you need to be worried about. Worry about the business model. If you get the business model right, and you have scalability problems (i.e. "Oh shucks there are too many people trying to pay me money!"), then you can just pay to get them resolved.
That may be right, but if you build expecting the scalability problem AND you get masses of users, you can swim in the money instead of using it to solve the problem.
McScrooge approves this message.