[thelist] HELP! .NET vs. the rest of the field- what choice to make?

[Jay Turley]

Hi evolters!

I have a project coming up, and the choice of technology has not been
determined yet.

It is to be a web 2.0 rich internet application and is targeted at a
very vertical market.

My experience includes coding for: Java/Oracle, PERL/CGI/Oracle,
classic ASP/Access, classic ASP/MSSql, PHP/MySql, .NET/MSSql, and a
little bit of RoR/MySql.

I have been experimenting with jQuery, prototype/scriptaculous, and mooTools/FX.

So as you can see, I am open to whatever technology best serves my needs.

Here are the requirements:

* Rapid, iterative development cycles
* Lots of inchstones instead of major milestones
* Ajax technology, but does not necessarily have to be unobtrusively
degradable (though it would be a nice touch)
* At most, two developers for the initial development

It is very strongly possible that we will hire a consultant we have
worked with before. He is a very skilled .NET architect and
programmer. He has done very good work for us before, and his
viewpoint is that "Visual Studio / .NET is the best software
development environment ever made so far".

Now I am not looking to start any holy wars, but having used .NET in
Visual Studio 2003, I was not very impressed and found it clunky and
overblown for what I needed. The debugging facilities were incredibly
useful however.

I have no experience with the Ajax toolset MS brought in VS2K5 and has
apparently been improving for the next release of VS. So I want to
know how well it works.

So, I would love to hear from anyone who has experience doing Rapid
Application Development no matter what the toolset used was. What did
you like about it, what didn't you like, and which toolset would you
recommend for future development.

The current technology I am looking at is using an MVC framework in
PHP, with the jQuery library. The database would be either MSSql or
MySql.

Thanks for any and all help,

-Jay