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Ask HN: opensource Ruby/Rails (or Python) based web app for source study?

12 points by misotakacs ↗ HN
We are building a small startup web app with friends and it's all built in PHP (Czech Nette framework). We all have extensive experience with PHP and the app is pretty nice design-wise (meaning data modeling, separation of concerns etc. It's also beautiful :))

However, after playing with Rails and learning Python a bit, I have my doubts about the choice of platform - Rails / Django with all the generation, pre-baked stuff, built in support for unit testing, supereasy deployment systems like Heroku, and yes, counting the current buzz that generates great support for these environments, I am ready to go for it.

I also built a simple but awesome system for world cup betting for my friends in an afternoon in Rails and hosted it for free on Heroku and it kind of sold me on RAD.

I'd rather change the app now while it's small (it's like 70% finished, no billing or other 3rd party stuff integrated yet).

So I guess I have 3 questions:

1) I need to study good Rails or some Python framework app code, especially data modelling parts, security, forms, validation. I want to do it right first time. Got any? :)

2) What do you guys recommend more - Ruby/Rails/Heroku (or some virtual) or some Python stack?

3) If you think that switching platform from "lots of experience" to "new world" in 70% of app finished is insanity, let me know. I just think that the work would be outweighted by benefits soon (plus the kick of doing something new), but I'm too close to the problem. Our current framework has community only in Czech and I think having international community for your tools is important (I am based in NYC personally).

Thanks!

11 comments

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jacquesm
PHP isn't all bad, it's super easy to deploy as well and on a bang-for-the-buck comparison it probably works out a lot cheaper than hosting a rails based app.

The rails stuff would most likely be faster to develop and would be easier to maintain long term, which also translates in to some value.

[dead] akshayubhat
List of open source Google App engine projects: http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/web/google-a...

In my opinion its better to start with GAE rather than Heroku, since GAE has a good gui app launcher and also provides simple interface for administrating your dev or deployed apps.

Not to forget that the free Resources and API support available for GAE is much more wider than that for Heroku.

Also GAE works very well on windows and Mac and linux.

orofan
Synopsi (hope you know) told me he's using Python framework named Tornado. Maybe give it try.
synopsi
Hey miso,

I'm python guy. Ruby and python are very similar, but you know this. It's pretty hard choice which one you should try/use. I choose python because google uses it, there is much bigger community, so there is better chance that you can find better support and devs which can work for you.

I'm using Tornado, which is lightweight webserver/framework with django and sqlmap. It's the best solution for me because of speed and stability. And there is another thing, which speaks for python. AppEngine. It's free and it's build pretty same like ggl's internal framework. Tornado is big copy of appengine's code culture developed by friendfeed guys (now facebook). It's very easy to write applications for it and it's free. There are limitations, but they are everywhere. You not need think about hosting in these days, because if you need, you can rent a cloud for very low amount and run your own server.

JangoSteve
It's not opensource, but I really like a lot of the code in the RailsKit SaaS kit (http://railskits.com/saas/). If you're doing a SaaS application that integrates with payment gateways (it sounds like you are), this would be a very well-spent $250, even if only to pick and pull bits of code from it.

There are some good Rails projects with source code listed in this thread as well:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/193632/where-can-i-find-g...

I've also worked on a large project based on the open Spree source (which was loosely based on Radiant source back in the day), but it has a lot of things that would be needlessly complex for your application in all likelihood (extensions... ugh), so that would probably confuse you more than help at this stage.