

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

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.
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mrshoe
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...

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whalesalad
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

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aaroneous
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.

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whalesalad
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.

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snprbob86
It looks like an average of 50,000 monthly uniques when school is in session.
Do you mind sharing your actual numbers?

And can you hazard a guess why Quantcast is so inaccurate? It seems curious,
considering you have their javascript tracking code on every page of your
site. If their tracker is so broken, why use them and not Google Analytics?

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jacquesm
Uniques monthly is totally meaningless.

This comes up with some frequency. Uniques daily * 30 != uniques monthly,
after all, if you undouble on a monthly basis and you get 30K visitors each
day and they're all different it looks like you have a cool 900K uniques
monthly. But at the same time it means you are completely not sticky! All your
users are replaced by new ones _every single day_.

A better measure is uniques daily, daily growth in uniques and compare that
with your uniques monthly. If you're doing it right you should see (30
_average repeats) + (30_ average growth)

Those are figures that you can do some planning on. Monthly uniques does not
do anything other than look good on paper. Bad websites look even better :)

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snprbob86
As I understand it, Quantcast's monthly uniques is the totally number of
different users to visit the site during that month. I assumed that daily
uniques were meaningless because of the nature of SchoolRack. Not every
student logs in every day. It seemed reasonable to assume that a month is a
reasonable amount of time for _most_ students, teachers, and parents to login
at least once. This tells you the actual number of people who actively use
such a service.

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jacquesm
only if you put the stats script on the pages behind the login and not on the
others.

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elai
Django. You should of made a poll.

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

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rewind
I always thought the grammar police had weekends off.

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boundlessdreamz
Am I the only one who thinks that people who are correcting the grammar and
spelling are actually doing a service. It really doesn't matter in a forum
like this.But if you have poor grammar,you may find that the impression you
make on other people may be less than stellar.A good command of the language
can be incredibly valuable. [Palin vs Obama]

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vijayr
valid point, not sure about the example though.

Palin's speeches won't make much sense, _even_ if they are grammatically
correct and presented elegantly.

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boundlessdreamz
Which is why I said "command of the language". Good grammar is merely the
starting point.

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

I'm assuming you meant "webapps".

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intranation
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).

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

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j15e
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 "->".

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RobKohr
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"

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chrischen
object arrow attribute is just not as smooth

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adw
We're not YC, but Django at Timetric.

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trefn
Django at Mixpanel.

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fuelfive
Rails at Frogmetrics, PollEverywhere, Posterous

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simanyay
Django at DISQUS.

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warfangle
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.

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jobenjo
Django at Fluther.

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Xixi
Django here too...

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

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redact207
ASP.NET MVC, sql server 08

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immad
Rails, heyzap.com

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poltergeist
Django here.

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andrewtj
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.

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Luyt
Python.

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

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larryfreeman
PHP on one project and Rails on the other.

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lyime
Rails + JS at Mugasha

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chrischen
PHP custom framework!

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mattdennewitz
django4life

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abalashov
GWT!

