The backend technology choice discussion!

Digital

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So this is the discussion that everyone loves to have, but is usually one where the answer is always "Use what works best for you and your project."

What do you prefer to use for your game's backend? Why did you choose it? What features did it give you that you didn't have with other solutions? What do you like about your choice over others? What do you not like about your choice? If you have completed your project, would you have chosen different now?

 
Currently have a game in development, and my choice for server side code is PHP + Laravel. I've been a web dev for many years and I prefer this setup partially because it's the most comfortable for me, but also because I've found it to be a nice balance of fast development with not a lot of bugs. I like Ruby on Rails but it can get too automagickal for me. It can be nice, but it's not a lot of fun when things start going wrong, plus I've found it to be much more painful to deal with Ruby that's 5+ years old vs. PHP. 

 
Another vote for PHP and Laravel.

As for why I picked PHP, just one I was always interested in and very big. It had been around a while and wasn't going away anytime soon. And I actually really like PHP. I started programming with C++ then Java in college, and in contrast PHP being loosely typed is kind of nice. I especially like PHP arrays, just throw whatever in it as needed.

As for why I chose Laravel. Well I knew I wanted to use a framework for my project. And did some research, checked out a few options, but ultimatally went with Laravel. It was still newer at the time but gaining popularility, but it was just nice, attractive, easy to use, eloquent (it's object relational mapper - ORM) seemed awesome, and had everything I was looking for in a framework. 

I have Eliyo on Laravel and would not go back on that. I would definitely chose Laravel again for similar projects in the future.

I have also used Fat Free Framework and think it was a good choice for what I was after. I use this for Animal Acres. I needed something that was lightweight, but had routing and some other basic things added in, but the biggest need was for it to integrate with my old codebase  without much hassle. This works great for me and even now some pages older and some have been integrated. If there is a file availabe in the directory, it lets it map to it as normal, otherwise fat frees routing takes over.

Now I have had some complaints, which I did remedy. 

One thing is the ORM always felt clunky even for basic things. I was constantly forgetting how to retrieve objects and have to look it up or copy and paste from paste code. Now it really isn't that hard, but for some reason it just wasn't sticking. So fix, I added eloquent to my project. Works great, love it, just wish I would have started doing that right away as now I have duplicates of the common modals such as user and animal with Fat Free objects and Eloquent objects. 

Second thing was the templating system. I never really got that to work. I was using already generated code that had PHP mixed in and everything that may have thrown it off but just decided not to use it since it's optional. I really didn't try that hard to get it working, but anyway after a while I got tried that, and have added in blade as well. Makes development a lot quicker and more enjoyable. So good changes for me, but the core is still Fat Free and can't say I regret that. I actually wouldn't have a problem recommending it for situations where you need to keep the old base and just work on things a section at time. Would just recommend adding in Eloquent and a templating engine of choice as well. :)

 
Thanks @Anoua for that wonderful write up, it is always amazing to see how other developers tackle handling older code bases and how they make technology decisions like that.

 
Another vote for PHP and Laravel. I started working with PHP as it was the easiest one to start with and get setup, plus the information online was just really easy to learn and I took no time in picking up the basics really quickly. I still remember the first moment I got my script to echo the obvious 'Hello World', and when I first connected a database to to output some records. It was such a rush. I'm glad I still get that rush (although with more complicated tasks now!).

I have also recently started using Meteor, which I would highly recommend if anyone wants to try something new. It's a lot of fun to work with and you can do some amazing things with it! 

 
Has anyone ever used the like of Python and Tornado/other MVC frameworks? I've been learning some python over the last few weeks for use in small-scale apps and have had quite a lot of fun playing with it. 

 
Has anyone ever used the like of Python and Tornado/other MVC frameworks? I've been learning some python over the last few weeks for use in small-scale apps and have had quite a lot of fun playing with it. 
I haven't really played with Python, although I have it on my list to try out.

How does it feel in a web environment? Easy to use, setup, get going with?

 
I use PHP for my backend. I have a custom PHP framework that I drag into most projects I do. During the development of said project, I sometimes find ways to improve my codebase, so I'll migrate those changes into my other projects, or simply just apply the changes to my source so that the improved version is used in the next project I do.

I use it out of comfort more than anything else. It's the second programming language I learned and I have never looked back :thumbsup:
 

 
I haven't really played with Python, although I have it on my list to try out.

How does it feel in a web environment? Easy to use, setup, get going with?
Very easy, actually. I haven't really tested anything that required real scalability though, so I'm unsure how easy it would be to work with in large scale applications. However for the simple sites I've used it with, it's been a breeze!

 
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