For a web-app product which would need to be installed by the customer on their own servers (think FogBugz or the self-hosted WordPress package), which technology stack would result in a smoother/easier installation?
Our target platforms are known: Windows/IIS/SQLSever and Linux/Apache/MySQL.
But the technology stack to be used is being debated around the office: PHP w/ no frameworks, PHP with Codeigniter, Python, ASP.Net with C# (running Mono for the Linux installations), Rails, Java, etc.
Some of the things to consider would be whether an average “out of the box” web server running IIS or Apache would have the required libraries to install the product if it were built using one technology rather than the other (for example, a PHP-based solution would probably be easier for the customer to deploy on a Linux machine as opposed to having to install mono and whatever other dependencies would be required to run an ASP.Net solution on a Linux machine as a web app).
We’re working on the assumption that the customer has some access to a system administrator, but perhaps not a full-time/dedicated one — something like a shared web host account.
Given that, we want the customer to be able to have the least amount of friction in installing the web app on their web server, and we’re debating the right technology stack to use for that.
PHP/MySql is brainless simple to set up on a unix stack. You can run in to problems with extensions and version-incompatibilities, but these are relatively minor compared to most other platforms. It’s a bit outside my main territory, but from what I hear PHP is quite well integrated into ISS these days. Microsoft has taken upon them selves to make PHP more compatible with their stack, and quite a few improvements in this area went into the newly released version 5.3.
If you use Python or Ruby, you could go with a strategy of supplying a web-server out-of-the-box. There are full-featured web servers implemented in both languages. They aren’t as robust as IIS or Apache of course, but for a low/medium traffic site they are OK. The customer could still set their main web server up to proxy your application. This makes it much easier to get started, since you can basically have a fully self-contained package.
In the end, I don’t think I would pick the technology solely based on how easy it is to deploy. With a little legwork, you can create installer packages for your major platforms, using any of the mentioned platforms (Well, perhaps mono/asp is a bit dodgy, but it could work).