What web based stack do I learn? • Hacker News Board

Post by arzvi » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 12:05 PM UTC

I am astounded with the latest developments and daily advancements in the web tech. I feel I want to contribute to it and enjoy the pleasure of 'creating' stuff that I can show to the world. I have little Ruby and PERL knowledge and know what REST is and routes in ROR are. I feel ROR is getting phased out for javascript based developments after Twitter admitted the scaling problems. I would like to position myself for the future too and that is why I am stating about the scaling issue. I am a RDBMS DBA and DB development supervisor where I work on tuning and managing development for projects. I am looking forward to creating something and aligning myself for the future with the latest and proven tech. Please let me know where to start?

1. nosql? MongoDB? Redis? CouchDB? Cassandra? Please let me know which one is neat implementation that I could learn and be able to adapt to other NoSQL dbs on demand,

2. Language - Ruby ? Python? Perl? PHP? javascript (is it even one??) 3. Framework?? Do I need to learn framework to create stuff or can I get by with good knowledge of any new languages above in creating my own MVC or other architecture based apps?

Any interesting new tech that I can interest a mid-level DBA and Dev supervisor with a knack for tuning and optimizing db code?? AM just too bored......

Post by wisty » Thu, Oct 13, 2011, 12:26 PM UTC

CouchDB can basically run a web site by itself - it's all HTTP, Javascript, and JSON. The wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/) is a good resource.

Mongo can be nicer to mess around with - it's fast and well documented and has good clients, but it's not very safe for production (unless you set it up correctly).

Redis is a data structure server - it's more for transient stuff than a database. Cassandra is good, but bloated.

Rails and Django are both nice. So's Flask and Tornado (both minimal Python frameworks).

Really, you don't need a perfect stack. You stack usually only gives you a linear boost, which can be gained by better hardware (up to a point). Most companies re-write bits of their stack, if they actually need to. It shouldn't be a real concern.