What technology platform to use ?

Ok, so alteris has a lot of experience in a few different languages.

We're producing a relatively smallish website and so Java is probably overkill.

We've a fair amount of recent experience in PHP, so that's a strong possibility.

However there's a new contender called Ruby, and with it's framework Rails it seems a strong candidate for web sites of our size. I looked awhile back and it seemed that it was quite poorly documented, but now they've got videos and the first 5% seems pretty well documented, and that's backed up with outline API details.

An old work colleague from Teleca had some recent experience in Ruby, so we thought it would be a good idea to try it out. Mike J gave me a clear and concise tutorial in an afternoon, and made me realise that Ruby was definately something I should do a couple of web apps in. As well as a strong Object-Orientated [OO] Model-View-Controller [MVC] framework, and a solid Object/Relational[O/R] mapping it has excellant migration of database schema, allowing you to evolve your system from a starting point to its end point without breaking it in the progress (and all being well maintain the database after-we'll see).

So the aim was to produce a simple registration screen using Ruby, which we pretty much achieved in an afternoon.

More soon...