What is the best server-side programming language for large scale web applications? [closed]

Question

I have a large web application idea that I would like to work on, which will require secure database interactions, file creation and editing abilities, speed, and output html. It needs to be able to run on a webhost, not a self-run server. What would be the best programming language to use to create it? I am not looking for 'easiest', I am looking for the most useful for the type of web application I wish to develop.

EDIT: It needs to be able to run on linux.

Answer 1

My pick would be ASP. NET MVC platform with Razor in-line syntax and C# for your code. .NET ticks all your boxes, plus it has a humongous community, lots of help resources, tutorials etc. online; probably the best coding tool out there (Visual Studio 2010), easy to integrate with cutting-edge stuff like html5, jQuery, CSS3, AJAX etc.

ASP.NET is Microsoft technology, hence you will need to develop on Windows (anything from XP and above will do). C# uses similar syntax to JAVA. Razor is new and fairly easy to use. .NET works very well with most databases and you can even manage both your code and database in the same tool (Visual Studio) depending on which DBMS you'll go for.

And I guess the biggest argument, as Matteo Mosca pointed out is that this very site was built using ASP .NET MVC and, in my opinion, it does its job pretty well.

Answer 2

Please define "webhost". For a lot of people, that means "PHP hoster", and that sort of limits your choice of languages to 1.

For a large webapp, I would definitely take something that runs on the JVM (assuming that your definition of "webhost" includes some shop that accepts .war files for hosting - I usually self-host on virtual machines and run the Play Framework because it is so much easier). On the JVM, you have a choice of frameworks and languages - and again check out Play - and here it starts depending on language skills, specific needs, etcetera. Scala would, for a large app, definitely be on my shortlist these days.

Note that I say "JVM", not "Java". I think the JVM ecosystem rocks - you will probably find a site that takes the standard .war file format to host, if you need a library it is usually there, performance is top-of-the-line. Java as a programming language is so-so, but luckily there is choice these days.

Also, a lot depends on your skills, your preferences, etcetera. I'd say that Python, Perl, Ruby, C# all are very viable languages to build large websites. What development languages do you prefer? At the end of the day, that's a big factor in speed and ease of developement...