Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749930

by wyw • 17 years ago

26 55 17 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

There's been a lot of info recently about the hosting plans of YC startups but less discussion about development technology trends. I would be curious to know what the dominant technology is for developing apps among YC startups.

poltergeist• 17 years ago

Django here.

whalesalad3• 17 years ago

Django, http://schoolrack.com

We (the developers) are actually beginning to feel like it's one of the biggest Django sites on the interweb right now. Definitely not trying to toot my own horn here, but we're gaining users like mad and traffic is insane.

Disclaimer: I figure the OP's question is more directed at HN members rather than YC startups, but for the record we're not a YC startup

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

Nice to see you gaining ground so fast during the holiday season, makes you wonder how it will go once school starts!

apsurd• 17 years ago

just a heads up: on the about page this sentence -> Our mission from the onset has been to seamlessly connecting teachers, students, and parents through the Internet.

should be "to seamlessly connect..." ?

whalesalad3• 17 years ago

Thanks for the heads up, just updated the servers.

gaia-forming• 17 years ago

Looking at the site, I have no doubts that you are doing well.

Very nice, I congratulate you. You have found a niche, and your execution is top notch.

aaroneous2• 17 years ago

Sorry to call you out, but your directly quantified Quantcast results show you at less than 1k uniques per day.

There are a LOT of Django sites out there with considerably more traffic and it misrepresents the size of the Django community to suggest that, "one of the biggest Django sites" is only serving a few hundred hits a day.

jacquesm4• 17 years ago

I believe the OP, I don't mind sharing my own stats, we're somewhere between 10 and 15 K uniques daily, google has us pegged at about 100k uniques (don't ask me what they're smoking there, probably something to do with subdomains), here is the alexa graph comparing ww.com and schoolrack.com, you can draw your own conclusions.

http://alexa.com/siteinfo/schoolrack.com+ww.com

A tripling of your traffic in 30 days during the 'off' season is a pretty good showing in my book, as long as it wasn't when coming from '10' users to '30' users :)

whalesalad3• 17 years ago

We get a lot less traffic during the summer months (school isn't in session) and towards the end of the year for the holidays... but we do get quite more traffic than our quantcast page suggests.

It does look like I was totally full of my own shit though, we're clearly not that big when it comes to the other Django sites out there.

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

Comparing Quantcast's estimates to the actual stats for a few sites I run (and have access to full logs/anayltics for) shows that Quantcast is severely (read: at least one order of magnitude in a couple cases) lowballing.

leif2• 17 years ago

oh thank god please please PLEASE kill blackboard

siong1987• 17 years ago

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/886221/does-django-scale

Look at the first answer. It seems like there are bigger django websites out there.

simanyay• 17 years ago

Django at DISQUS.

elai2• 17 years ago

Django. You should of made a poll.

christopherdone• 17 years ago

It's "should have"; the contraction is "should've".

rewind• 17 years ago

I always thought the grammar police had weekends off.

trefn• 17 years ago

Django at Mixpanel.

Luyt• 17 years ago

Python.

leif2• 17 years ago

Django if I use a framework, but usually straight python or perl CGI.

I'm assuming you meant "webapps".

warfangle• 17 years ago

Rails at one; we're looking into liftweb/scala at the other.

We see the robustness of the jvm as a lot more useful at the latter- and scala seems like a good fit (better than java itself, or ruby for that matter) for the kind of datamining we're going to do. Granted, C would likely be much faster, but the ability to include third party java packages and the amount of boilerplate needed for C turned us off to that. Add in a good web framework like Lift, and we don't see the need to fracture our server-side apps into many different languages.

mrshoe2• 17 years ago

Rolled our own in Python.

EDIT: I should mention that CherryPy is at its heart. We love CherryPy. And our chat backend uses a secret sauce Python async framework that might or might not be open sourced very soon...

Xixi2• 17 years ago

Django here too...

Xixi2• 17 years ago

Ooops, I should have added : not a YC startup.

fuelfive• 17 years ago

Rails at Frogmetrics, PollEverywhere, Posterous

larryfreeman• 17 years ago

PHP on one project and Rails on the other.

lyime• 17 years ago

Rails + JS at Mugasha

immad• 17 years ago

Rails, heyzap.com

j15e• 17 years ago

Here we are using PHP/CakePHP on almost all our projects.

Why? I have being using PHP for almost 10 years, so it was a lot easier to switch to a PHP framework when I switched to an open source framework about 3 years ago. PHP is also easier to get on a shared hosting (maybe not anymore, but at the time I made my switch, it was a major concern).

Like : API, doc, large community.

Dislike : php syntax (->), no active record, PHP4 support (no real visibility control), deployment on windows/ISS is no easy task.

But future looks good as they plan to drop PHP4 quite soon with 1.3.

Some website we created using cake: http://www.themetropolitain.ca http://www.gogarneau.com

I hate "->".

RobKohr• 17 years ago

It is funny, when every I speak php to another coder I call -> "dot". It isn't a dot, it is an arrow, but something got wired that way in my brain. "Object" "dot" "attribute"

chrischen3• 17 years ago

object arrow attribute is just not as smooth

dkokelley• 17 years ago

Poll version: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=750142

adw• 17 years ago

We're not YC, but Django at Timetric.

andrewtj• 17 years ago

Startup is Global Hostname: http://www.globalhostname.com/

DNS server is implemented in Twisted (but is not derived from twisted.names) and web site is Django+nginx. Database is Postgres.

jobenjo• 17 years ago

Django at Fluther.

redact207• 17 years ago

ASP.NET MVC, sql server 08

jerryji• 17 years ago

Pylons [ http://pylonshq.com/ ] -- a lightweight (Python) web framework emphasizing flexibility and rapid development.

abalashov• 17 years ago

GWT!

intranation• 17 years ago

Short: we use a Django frontend to an Erlang backend.

Long answer: we used Django because that's what I knew best, but we're going to switch to Pylons because it's more flexible (being a so-called "glue framework") and has less dependency on a database (tried writing a custom authentication backend in Django without a database? Good luck).

So Django is great if you have a database; less so if you don't (I guess that's the whole "full stack" thing).

mattdennewitz• 17 years ago

django4life

chrischen3• 17 years ago

PHP custom framework!

Ask YC Startups: Do you use Django, Rails, PHP or Other?

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