As a minor point, PHP5 is robust and stable. Has been for a good few years. Widely reporting problems such as the magic quotes and global registration of request variables haven't been a issue for years and years. (Unless you are using a very cheap hosting provider still using the old fashioned PHP4 I suppose.)
I think the main choices at the moment are Rails and a reasonably good PHP framework such as Zend Framework or Sympony. (I'm in the ZF camp personally). There's also Django which uses Python, of course.
One advantage to using PHP is that there's significant resources available now providing information on how to write a secure PHP appliction. I don't know if there is the same breadth of security information avialable for using ruby and python for web applications. On the flip side, the "cool kids" are using Ruby or Python nowadays, if that matters to you.
In terms of allowing usage without JavaScript, I'm of the opinion that this is still important for accessibility reasons. It's much easier to write an accessible website when JS is off than to write one when it's on. Also, search engine crawlers don't do JS, so you need to keep in mind what you are shutting Google out of too. (This may of course be irrelevant for your application.)
Whatever you do, make sure you have a debugging solution available for stepping through your code both server side and client side :)
by Rob. — Aug 05
I think the main choices at the moment are Rails and a reasonably good PHP framework such as Zend Framework or Sympony. (I'm in the ZF camp personally). There's also Django which uses Python, of course.
One advantage to using PHP is that there's significant resources available now providing information on how to write a secure PHP appliction. I don't know if there is the same breadth of security information avialable for using ruby and python for web applications. On the flip side, the "cool kids" are using Ruby or Python nowadays, if that matters to you.
In terms of allowing usage without JavaScript, I'm of the opinion that this is still important for accessibility reasons. It's much easier to write an accessible website when JS is off than to write one when it's on. Also, search engine crawlers don't do JS, so you need to keep in mind what you are shutting Google out of too. (This may of course be irrelevant for your application.)
Whatever you do, make sure you have a debugging solution available for stepping through your code both server side and client side :)
Regards,
Rob...