fastest public web app framework for quick DB apps?

Posted by Steve Eisner on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Steve Eisner
Published on 2010-05-20T20:54:10Z Indexed on 2010/05/20 21:00 UTC
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I'd like to pick up a new tech for my toolbox - something for rapid prototyping of web apps. Brief requirements:

  • public access (not hosted on my machine) - like Google's appengine, etc
  • no tricky configuration necessary to build a simple web app host
  • DB access (small storage provided) including some kind of SQLish query language
  • easy front end HTML templating
  • ability to access as a JSON service
  • C# or Java,PHP or Python - or a fun new language to learn is OK
  • free!

An example app, very simple: render an AJAXy editable (add/delete/edit/drag) list of rich-data list items via some template language, so I can quickly mock up a UI for a client. ie. I can do most of the work client-side, but need convenient back end to handle the permanent storage. (In fact I suppose it doesn't even need HTML templating if I can directly access a DB via AJAX calls.)

I realize this is a bit vague but am wondering if anyone has recommendations. A Rails host might be best for this (but probably not free) or maybe App Engine, or some other choice I'm not aware of? I've been doing everything with heavyweight servers (ASP.NET etc) for so long that I'm just not up on the latest...

Thanks - I'll follow up on comments if this isn't clear enough :)

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