

Ask HN: What would you build an email-heavy webapp on? - kulkarnic

Hello!<p>I'm working with a friend on a webapp that involves sending and receiving copious amounts  of email. While the application does have a web-interface, this interface is mostly used for simple CRUD operations on data that comes in via email (text and binary attachments).<p>I wanted to get the opinion of folks here on what is the best technology stack to go about this.<p>1. Ease of programming is more important to me than scalability (basically, I'm the only developer on this one, and I want to do as many iterations as possible)<p>2. I have worked with Django/Python, Ruby/Rails, and C# (and sigh... with Java too), and I'm comfortable with all these frameworks/languages. Posterous (also email-heavy) seems to be using Rails (from their ngynx server).<p>If you've worked on a similar application, or would like to recommend a particular stack, please help me out! :)<p>Thanks!
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jaddison
I think you'll likely get a lot of biased answers in here, and here's mine:
Django.

I've had great success with nginx (load balancing, static serving) ->
apache/wsgi/django (dynamic). Have a local postfix email server that handles
the email sending requests rather than sending to a remote SMTP host - it will
keep things snappy. Overall, it's a simple, easily scalable (horizontally)
setup.

Of course, I am sure that RoR would work equally well in a similar
configuration. Basically, if you're not worried about webapp performance, you
can use any language that you're comfortable with and allows _you_ to iterate
quickly. For me, that language is Python.

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yummyfajitas
I'd suggest Django for the web and Lamson for email.

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iamclovin
+1 for lamson. Closest I've seen to what an email-app framework must represent

