Posted by Sir Four at 5:01pm Dec 15 '09Please be specific. There's no real point to this thread other than curiosity.
The question is a bit vague, since it doesn't specify what type of web site you are building. Consider a relatively fully-featured site with with a high volume of traffic. What tools of the trade would you apply?
The two programming languages I've worked most closely with are Java and PHP. (4K is written in Java.) If I were starting a new site today, I would probably choose PHP. I would use Apache as the web server and Postgres as the database, on a linux machine.
PHP isn't the speediest language, but I feel there is more in place to get you making progress quickly (in the language itself as well as the online community of web developers). Java, of course, has some real slick stuff (for free!) out there, too (like the Quartz scheduler, which is so much better than cron). But I've also run into many problems locating handy libraries, such as for image manipulation.
One major missing feature of PHP is that it is a huge pain to persist data beyond the life of one script execution. The language just wasn't designed that way, and one often has to resort to caching plugins. I've tried APC and it works okay, but not great. The major flaw in APC is no garbage collection, so objects can hang around for long after they are set to expire.
I'd use Apache because it's rock-solid, free, and has fantastic plugins, like mod_rewrite that would be difficult to live without.
I'd pick Postgres over MySQL because the latter is (sorry, fans) more of a hobbyist database than the real thing. In order to achieve its speed, key functionality is left disabled by default (transactions??? foreign keys???). If data integrity is not crucial, though, MySQL could be a valid choice.
The question is a bit vague, since it doesn't specify what type of web site you are building. Consider a relatively fully-featured site with with a high volume of traffic. What tools of the trade would you apply?
The two programming languages I've worked most closely with are Java and PHP. (4K is written in Java.) If I were starting a new site today, I would probably choose PHP. I would use Apache as the web server and Postgres as the database, on a linux machine.
PHP isn't the speediest language, but I feel there is more in place to get you making progress quickly (in the language itself as well as the online community of web developers). Java, of course, has some real slick stuff (for free!) out there, too (like the Quartz scheduler, which is so much better than cron). But I've also run into many problems locating handy libraries, such as for image manipulation.
One major missing feature of PHP is that it is a huge pain to persist data beyond the life of one script execution. The language just wasn't designed that way, and one often has to resort to caching plugins. I've tried APC and it works okay, but not great. The major flaw in APC is no garbage collection, so objects can hang around for long after they are set to expire.
I'd use Apache because it's rock-solid, free, and has fantastic plugins, like mod_rewrite that would be difficult to live without.
I'd pick Postgres over MySQL because the latter is (sorry, fans) more of a hobbyist database than the real thing. In order to achieve its speed, key functionality is left disabled by default (transactions??? foreign keys???). If data integrity is not crucial, though, MySQL could be a valid choice.
What Technology Would You Use to Build a Web Site - Sir Four