Howdy,

I had a few ideas for simple online sites that would be perfect for the whole facebook notifications / android app style of integration. I could start with vi and write a php website, but I've no idea what standard frameworks are available for the more rapid development of sites like this. integrating with openid / google accounts etc... what tools are people using to put together these big blocks of drop in functionality and then tieing together with hopefully surprisingly little code? I'm aware of Django to some extent, should I be digging deeper into this?

I've used Django and I think it's great.

You will find that most frameworks are fairly similar, as they're usually based on the MVC pattern and more specifically on Ruby on Rails (which was the pioneer). One I would not recommend is ASP.NET MVC, as its developers are very focused on adding features, with all the drawbacks that that implies.

I would also say that if you're trying to build a PHP or ASP website without using a framework, then you're doing it wrong.

For the front end, you definitely want to use jQuery. Unless, of course, you want to build a single-page webapp with no page refreshes, in which case you should use Google Web Toolkit to build the frontend.

If you want a partial list of frameworks that I'm aware of, there are:

Ruby:

• Rails

PHP:

• Symfony
• CakePHP
• Zend
• CodeIgniter

Python:

• Django

C#:

• ASP.NET MVC