Ask HN: Most popular server-side high level languages?

[stcredzero]

What are the most popular server-side high level languages right now, by active user/developer community? Is there a good way to filter client-side from server side development use in some kind of census? Admittedly, the line between client and server is a bit blurry. (Much of what's implemented on a Rails server is really UI, for example.) I'd also be curious to see 3 numbers, one for definitely client, another for pretty much server, and a third for a bit of both.

[ihumanable]

I use PHP for my day to day as well. The community and the language are both very active, tons of cheap reliable hosting, well known and understood performance and scaling profiles. PHP is easy to get wrong but not all too difficult to get right.

The one thing I like about PHP more than anything is the lack of abstraction, there is no "response" object you are writing to, you want 'some-crazy-tag-with-weird-attributes' you don't have to trick your library into outputting it, everything is just strings you echo out.

With the glut of web frameworks for PHP (CakePHP, Symfony, NOLOH, etc.) you can go full blown MVC fairly easily. I prefer to work with Flourish http://flourishlib.com as I find it to be the perfect core for a website.

[carucez]

I use PHP as my scripting language. A lot of my server-side processing is done in PHP, including sockets and statistical analysis. I know it best, and am most effective with it.

Python is a bit more robust for all things higher-level, and I would recommend that before PHP any day (for someone starting out in).

Client side stuff is (for me) all JavaScript, always, using the JQuery library to ease my web pain.

HOWTO do divide Client from Server? Separate machines and insist that all back-end processing and storage goes on one set, and all client-side functionality goes on the other. Loading/parsing of archived data is a client-side process, as far as I'm concerned. Use standard protocols and formats to talk between the machines.

[pavel_lishin]

Ditto, except for me the breakdown is PHP for work, Python for personal projects.

[chipmunkninja]

"Popular" here is going to mean maybe 15% market share, if my memory serves correctly. Popular server languages remain Java, PHP, ASP.NET, and increasingly Ruby.

In my mind, the reality is that you should choose the programming language based on the skills of you or your programmer(s) and the task at hand. If I were going to implement a banking system, I'd probably look first at Java and its J2EE libraries to see what options were available there. I've used PHP recently (despite it being a reasonably painful language) because it has some wonderful productivity and scalability features that we've been able to really take advantage of.

However, I've nothing against any of the other platforms (with the exception of a slight bias away from anything that requires me running windows servers), and have been fiddling with Ruby, and also exploring Haskell, Erland, Clojure, and even Scala.

Unless we're talking in-house applications using VB or C#, or mobile phone applications using ObjC or Java, "client-side" almost always means HTML/CSS/JS these days.

So, look at the task and the talent, and go from there. Most of the common platforms that you've heard of are all going to have large enough communities for support and libraries to perform various non-standard tasks.

Good luck!

[davidw]

If you have any good ideas for how to discern those categories, I'm always trying to think of new ideas for http://langpop.com .

[CyberFonic]

I would suggest NodeJS. It lets you do many of the essential low level server side operations. And if you already know JavaScript from working with browsers, then you'll feel right at home.

[adn37]

I've been using CakePhp for about 3 years, on sideprojects.

Planning to learn a Java/Scala based 'equivalent'.

[dawsdesign]

Django and PHP (CakePHP, Codeigniter, etc), and obviously RoR.

My current favorite is Python/Flask.

[dawsdesign]

PHP is the quickest to get up and going and will probably be the cheapest to host. Unless you go the Google App Engine route. PHP is probably the most promiscuous though.