In the next 24 hours I will be starting a new project – a “next generation LMS system” for the UM Medical School – this is a small prototype but I hope it shows the way for how LMS systems will work in the future.
\nMy angst today is what to write it in – and frankly I am still not 100% sure – if you have any suggestions – hurry up – I need to know soon.
\nShould I use Java?
\nJava scales and when you have a lot of code – strict interfaces are great. But Java simply means that when you try to build an open source community – you will be ridiculed by hobby programmers for choosing Java because it is too *hard*.
\nPHP + MySql \/ LAMP?
\nMan this is tempting – it works so well – ISP’s make this work for $3 per month trivially. It is really really direct to slap stuff together. And it is nice and relational. It feels so hacky though. Maybe PHP5 makes it feel a little better.
\nRuby on Rails?
\nI love Ruby on Rails – I have never felt so productive in an environment – it is the best way to write elegant code I know of. But it needs to find a hold in the market place. I do not like the feeling of living on the edge and having to become a zealot and sell folks on the framework before I sell them on my product. Last year this time – I put together a small LMS in Ruby – and it was great fun – http:\/\/www.rubytoozday.org\/. I could even start with that code for my NG project.
\nPython and App Engine?
\nGoogle is behind this – I like that a *lot*. I like Python. I like App Engine’s free accounts. I worry that I cannot scale my service in App Engine yet – there is no pay account and I cannot run App Engine on my own production infrastructure. Oh yeah – and that missing relational database might be a bit of a learning curve. At the same time – in the real world of big-time scalability – sharding is your friend – so why not byte the bullet and force myself to understand sharding.
\nSo on the drive into work this morning – it seemed that even in 2008 – there was no good solution to this problem. DANG!
\nBut as the miles rolled by – I realized that my new application was really about Javascript, JQuery, JSON, REST, and some back end. And I was fussing about what the back-end would be. I already had made much of the decisions of the project without realizing it.
\nSo this makes it less painful to make a choice. Because it is only the headless back end that I am talking about. Even so the back end is an important bit.
\nSo unless I change my mind in the next 24 hours – it will be Python with the following caveats: (a) the real good stuff is isolated into code that does not depend on the App Engine at all, (b) any APIs are defined in REST\/JSON and not in Python itself.
\nThe thing that scares me the most is learning sharding under pressure. This is the App Engine risk. I will need to hide my storage behind an abstraction. If I feel too much pain too quickly, I may fall back to PHP or Rails – that will be a harder decision – because Rails is so productive but I don’t have it memorized yet – PHP is a hack but I do have more of PHP and MySql memorized.
\nOh the pain of making this decision!
\nIf someone wants to help and\/or get involved in this – let me know. I don’t have enough time to do this and I am pretty much a beginner in the technologies I am intending to use (REST, JSON, Javascript, JQuery, and Python App Engine). I guess that is why they call it “life long learning”.
\nSeriously, if you want to help, I would much appreciate it – I need folks who can really *help* – I do need folks smarter than me who have more time than me. I may be even able to use Med School funds to pay the right person to work on this with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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