Which language for SaaS type stuff

[englishpremier]

If you were building an on-line app. A kind of SaaS type thing, similar to the likes of say mail chimp or campaign monitor (but way more basic), or a blogging platform, or cms, which language would be best suited to the task, in terms of elegance, scalability, and deployment?

Whilst I mess around with HTML/CSS i'm not a programmer, but want to learn a language whilst trying to build an on-line program to manage email lists.

 

[durbs]

If you were building an on-line app. A kind of SaaS type thing, similar to the likes of say mail chimp or campaign monitor (but way more basic), or a blogging platform, or cms, which language would be best suited to the task

There is no single language/platform suited to that. Any of the 'web' languages are suited to it so whether you choose PHP, Ruby, Python, .NET, Perl, Coldfusion etc etc it doesn't matter. Same goes for any web app you can think of really.

For a newbie, PHP & Python are fairly easy to pick up and both are capable, powerful languages.

I'd personally recommend .NET C#/MVC along with Entity Framework or NHibernate as worth learning, bit harder to pick up but a joy to use. Equally, any of the previous examples would do the job so just try a few tutorials and see which you are most comfortable with.

 

[m4rkw7]

PHP is a must really and Python may come in hand you'll also need to know SQL

 

[Xelene]

PHP is the most widespread. It misses a lot of what I consider to be core functionality for anything beyond simple sites - but you really can get stuff up and running in no time with it.
A more heavily software engineered site would typically be done in Java or .NET; although sometimes I find both of those languages to be a little heavyweight.
Ruby and Python are both well suited to the task, Ruby was the hot new thing a few years back; but I think Python has more Inertia (and certainly more developers know it).
One of the original serverside scripting languages that died a death is making something of a resurgence, Javascript. I never quite got why there were seperate back end and front end languages and with Google throwing it's weight behind stuff like V8 it's interesting.

Whatever language you pick, you'll likely want to pick up some sort of framework along with it - so you don't have to reinvent too many wheels.

Here's a starter list of stuff to look at, it's not by any means exhaustive - but there's a good wikipedia article to list some options...

PHP - Zend, Code Igniter, Symfony
Python - Django
Ruby - Rails
Java - Grails, Spring
.NET - No Idea
Javascript - Maybe Node.js (not really a framework per se.)

For your purposes, i'd probably pick Python + Django. It's easy to learn, and teach you some relatively good habits

 

[sandeep]

I'm actually in the process of making my own email marketing platform.

The first thing you want to do is get the database sorted. You need to think about what tables you need and how the whole relational structure will sum up.

From there you can start building and programming using your database as a core.

One thing you'll also need to think about is the email programming language, each SaaS company has their own proprietary programming language (mailchimp: *|FIELDNAME|*, ExactTarget %%FIELDNAME%%) You can do this very simply by using regex.

Sorry about the structure on my post but as a final note, take a look into the Yii PHP Framework - It can generate a PHP 5 MVC structure right from a database.

Hope this post was helpful.