> Before you choose Ruby/Rails I suggest you investigate deployment difficulties.

Just to clarify this comment, most of the deployment difficulties regarding rails are from 4-5 years ago. For example, If you are seeing complaints about Mongrel, this is most likely a dated complaint. Today deployment has been made easy via tools like Capistrano for moving code and Phusion Passenger for hosting, which integrates with Apache.

However, it can be tricky if you are developing on Windows, though that problem can easily be solved with VirtualBox ;-).

Dave

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 5:39 PM, Garrett Kuchta <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I used Symfony extensively in my contractor days, and I'm fairly
partial.  It doesn't care much about your database schema, so it's
pretty easy to throw it atop a pre-existing model definition -- or a
random set of tables which vaguely resemble a model, if squinting from
a distance.  The learning curve isn't too steep if you've worked with
other MVC frameworks, and there's plenty of documentation.  That said,
I haven't touched it in at least a year, so I don't know what it's up
to these days -- there might be frameworks more suited to the task, or
something lighter weight; personally, I've since moved to Django for
non-work projects, but mostly because my pet problems fit nicely into
python's list comprehensions and lazy evaluations.

That said, I really want to echo what David Naughton said. If you guys
already have tools that you're familiar with, why not use them?  Is
there something in Groovy/Grails that's working against you?  For what
it's worth, every framework's going to be pretty much the same;
there's just varying degrees of hand-holding and "oh yeah, we already
thought of that."

Cheers,

Garrett

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 5:26 PM, Nathaniel Sigrist <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Or you could grab php zend.  Php is already an extensive language with a lot off functions built into it.  Zend has even more functionality if you are really lazy :-)  (all free of course).  Ruby has been growing in popularity and has a large following with plenty of published books.  If you are looking for support check out stackoverflow.com
>
> Craig Gjerdingen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>I don't know if you're open to it, but I'm pretty partial to Microsoft .Net
>>framework and platform stack.
>>
>>Pretty much everything from the front end to the back end is totally
>>integrated. It is a wonderful developer/designer experience.
>>
>>Additionally, these tools are all available for NO additional cost to you as UMN
>>staff. But you have to ask for Visual Studio 2010 professional edition from
>>[log in to unmask] because they don't list it on
>>https://download.software.umn.edu/ any more (now it is in netfiles)
>>
>>In particular the combination of the powerful Visual Studio 2010 IDE, .Net
>>framework 4.0, Entity Framework or NHibernate, and ASP.Net MVC 2 are a
>>formidable offering. Again all of this has NO added cost to you. It's all free.
>>
>>There are a ton of IOC and ORM offerings in the .Net space so you can easily
>>choose one to your liking.
>>
>>MEF and Unity (dependency injector) are fairly cool too.
>>
>>Support, Training, Developer Communities, Books, knowledgeable consultants,
>>campus expertise, 3rd party vendors are all available.
>>
>>One configuration you might want to look at to get started (where someone
>>else has done the work of picking the pieces for you) would be to look at
>>http://SharpArchitecture.net/ which is stored on GitHub at
>>http://github.com/codai/Sharp-Architecture
>>
>>Before you choose Ruby/Rails I suggest you investigate deployment difficulties.
>



--
David Peterson
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Office of Institutional Research
University of Minnesota
http://www.oir.umn.edu

612-625-0914
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