[HacktionLab] Web development language question

[Charlie Harvey]

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On 01/07/14 08:58, Mike Harris wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've asked this question before to see what people felt, but that was
> well over a year ago so I'll ask it again.
> 
> Say you work on a web based service with a lot of legacy code written in
> an older web-scripting language, Perl, and you're wanting to move to a
> newer language for web applications, or even a framework to do new
> development - you're still planning to support the legacy code for a
> number of years - what language and/or framework would you pick?

Hi,

If it was in perl anyway I'd have a look at
dancer(http://perldancer.org/), mojolicious(http://mojolicio.us/) or
catalyst(http://www.catalystframework.org/) to make a frontend, and
gradually transition across.

I'd also consider making a REST content API and using angular.js, or
backbone.js or [insertsomeclevername].js rather than building everything
server side. But that would depend on the project. Maybe I'd just look
for a drupal module or wordpress plugin or write one.

Have to agree with Naomi that Node and javascript has a lot of traction
right now.

There are a lot of interesting things going on on the JVM-based
languages too -- clojure and scala have some really interesting web
frameworks especially if you're building something that needs to scale.

And Erlang has a framework called webmachine for doing web APIs
https://github.com/basho/webmachine/wiki/Overview.

Having said all that, from what I know of it, Django is a solid choice,
specially if you want to learn a bit of python anyway.

Cheers,



> What you'd like to do though is avoid jumping on something that is too
> new and too buzzy - http://ttfa.net/lemonmarket - as you'd like to make
> a technology decision that would be good at least for the next five
> years, if not more, and today's rising star could quite easily be in
> tomorrow's dustbin.
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Mike.
> 
> p.s. and yes it's a work question, but one interesting I think
> 


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