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Posted: Thu May 17, 2007 4:42 pm
by Ollie Saunders
rukus206,

Let me get realistic here. You can't build a large scale website without a good deal of know how. Well.... you can but it'll probably be unmaintainable, insecure, time-taking and soul destroying crap. PHP is certainly up to the job of coping with large scale sites as the performance talks will vouch for. But this is besides the point because you don't have a site to worry about the performance yet. You probably don't have a detailed designs yet.

Start out by understanding what is important by reading Getting Real and Designing the Obvious. Develop a good idea of what you want to achieve.

From here on in I would recommend you hire at least one good programmer with proven experience using OO and XP esp. unit testing practises, if this person codes in Java so be it. Then launch the project as open source. Your programmer(s) can take responsibility for ensuring all the server side code is well organised whilst your can concentrate on other issues of quality such as interface design, accessibility, visual styling, web standards, security, internationalization, compatibility,.... these are all things you can read about.

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 10:50 am
by rukus206
arborint wrote:
stereofrog wrote:That's simple. 1 line of Rails code = 10 lines of php (with framework) = 100 lines of php (with standard library).
But what about the other 999 lines in you application that aren't like that. ;)

Honestly, I think Rails is a great framework and have done a couple of sites with it. But you don't do it any service to boast a order of magnitude in code reduction. That is deceptive at best. Do you have, for example, a Rails based app that has the identical functionality in 10-100 times fewer lines? I checked Mephisto and Wordpress -- the both have around 500k of code...
arborint - I agree, but I think stereofrog's comparison was an simplistic exaggeration for general effect. I didn't take what stereofrog wrote literally, but I understand where you're coming from. The main point I take away from that post is that, all things considered, Rails produces cleaner code than PHP. I appreciate the clarification, however...

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 10:54 am
by rukus206
ole - Thanks for the realistic feedback and suggestions. That's exactly what I was looking for. I've some preliminary research, but do you know how much (approximately) I can expect to pay for an experienced programmer? What's the market rate for someone with that skill set?

Posted: Fri May 18, 2007 2:08 pm
by Ollie Saunders
This might help. Contractor will charge a significant percentage more though, maybe 30%?