Single person working on a web app. What platform to use?
savant: I agree with this sentiment completely. 12 months ago, I can safely say that my experience with PHP had been a simple modification of an ExtJS application and me screwing around with my Delicious bookmarks and the Yahoo BOSS API (both of these took more than a day to complete and I was very upset with life).I decided that I should learn how to actually create working websites and over the Winter Intercession, I looked at the various frameworks. Being on a Mac, I looked long and hard at Ruby on Rails, but something about it's syntax irked me. In hindsight, it shouldn't have as my only experience had been with Java and other related OOP languages, but oh well.I next looked at Zend, as many of the apps I developed for (Joomla, WordPress etc) were PHP apps, and therefore it made sense to go with what the Zend Engine people created. It took all of 2 minutes to realize that it would take me HOURS to figure out how to setup a basic MVC package. Not to mention a friend had used Zend in a previous project of ours - I developed the frontend in ExtJS, he the backend API - and was thoroughly upset with it.I moved on to CodeIgniter and Kohana and thought it was great... except that it required that I specify a lot. I hate specifying things. Love automagic.From there, it was Symfony, but it's application tutorial was too big and confusing for a PHP-noob like me (http://www.symfony-project.org/jobeet/1_4/Doctrine/en/). I think I just didn't give it enough of a chance.Then I read about the recently released 1.2 release of CakePHP. Loved the name, thought the documentation and community names were funny - The Cookbook and The Bakery, respectively - and I was able to do the blog tutorial in less than 30 minutes (to their credit, I'm an idiot). I was happy enough then to start thinking about more complex applications and start to do something about them. I'm here almost 12 months later with around 30 or so active, open source projects on Github, 4 or 5 deployed websites, a few web applications puttering around on my machine, and quite a few in planning.I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't limit yourself two a choice of two, but try several frameworks and languages. Try languages you don't know at all (Chicago Boss looked nice, but development has slowed. You could try using NodeJS! Django is cool too.) and try frameworks in languages you are familiar with (Someone mentioned Play Framework, which I think is the best RAD framework in Java, and PHP has CakePHP/CodeIgniter/Zend/Symfony/Lithium).Choosing a language and a framework isn't about what excites other people, but what excites you. Find a combination that excites you and do it.