When using Microsoft ASP.Net, we would have to check that all the developers had checked in, then compile for 20 minutes, create a setup file, ftp the file to the server, check that no one was logged in (as this generally stopped the installation), run the installer for 5 minutes and then check that nothing was broken and if it was spend 30 minutes rolling everthing back by hand.

Now one of us just presses an icon on our toolbar which runs a batch file, asking which installation we want to install, put in the server password and 30 seconds later the web app is up.  Worth its weight in gold and allows the testers to have fast version turn arounds.

1. Microsoft ASP.Net – this is the obvious choice since I have been using it since its inception.  Whilst it is well supported and easy to find developers for, it is around the peripheral edges that ASP.Net has problem.  The Team system is expensive and you must work according to Microsoft’s processes.  Hosting is relatively expense and install/upgrades takes ages and cannot be done with a simple click of a button.  AJAX is a bolt on, building a website with subdomain infrastructure means writing an IIS extension and there is no easy way to produce clean URLs.
2. Google Application Engine – this is the future of web development but not at the moment.  GAE supports python and the Django framework and looked very promising until one got into the details and saw that they had to pull a lot of the useful stuff out of Django to make it work within the engine.  Subdomains look tricky as well, but as a start looks very promising and is one to keep an eye on in the future.
3. Rails – now matured and has some great positives for fast development.  My concerns are that the pace of development means that a lot of the documentation is out of date and with the majority of information found on blogs – it is difficult to find how to do something correctly.  As an interpreted language, it will also be slower than some of the others but new engines are coming along which should speed it up.
4. Grails – similar MVC architecture to rails but using the Java language.  It is a little too new and I think finding developers to help will be tricky.

There are obviously loads of other platforms and could investigate for ever and a day.  The decision today will not necessarily be the right decision tomorrow but we need to get moving.  I have decided to go with Rails as it is the most mature MVC architecture and I want to see if it does gives development performance that it claims.