What platform should you use to build your first web application?

Question

I'm deciding between LAMP and Google App Engine with Python. Mainly this is an educational experience so I'm weighing the potential ease/quickness of developing on App Engine against the value in learning LAMP from the get go (and not being locked into the App Engine way of doing things

Answer 1

It depends on where you come from. If you're already familiar with either PHP or Python, I'd let my choice depend on that.

If you're starting from scratch, there's a few things to consider :

• PHP (if you consider the P in LAMP to be that) has the advantage that there is a huge amount of web applications/sites out there that use it. If you're aim is to be able to modify or contribute to lots of other webapps, I think you should go with PHP. On the other hand PHP is easy to mess up and it is hard to cleanly seperate webdesign and code. PHP has no real application outside of web development that I am aware of (I may be wrong).
• Python is a real sweet language with a clean syntax and a lot of (third party) libraries. Python has lots of applications outside of web development.
• Google App Engine allows for a clean MVC approach in conjunction with Django (among others). A MVC approach allows to cleanly seperate HTML/CSS/Javascript layout stuff and Python Code.
• If you master GAE/Python, it's a small step to go to Django, running on (Linux|Windows)/(Apache|Ningx)/(MySQL|several OtherDB's).