Question

I’m a good programmer who has never written a web app.

I want to make one that will present simple questions with multiple choice answers and time the responses to them.

It should allow people to just play with the questions without logging in, but also to create accounts allowing them to store the records of how they’ve done.

I’d like the stored data to be easily accessible to data-analysis tools, so an easy dump to text file format would be nice.

I’m fairly agnostic about the language, I can speak enough computer languages that learning to use one I’ve never seen before would be a few days work. I do have a preference for expressive languages.

And I have a bit of a dislike of anything that creates a hello world app by generating a huge tree of difficult to understand code.

So I guess I’m looking for a language and framework that will give me common things like user accounts, https, login with google ids, url parsing, etc for free, but let me construct my own app, rather than something that will generate an app for me and then let me customise it.

Can anyone recommend such a language/framework/library?

Paul Graham’s Arc would have been ideal, I think, if it had taken off. Is there anything like that in spirit?

Answer 1

Well, if you don’t mind building a simple system like that yourself, you could try and use:

• Sinatra (Ruby) for the backend server
• DataMapper/Sequel for connecting to a DB
• Backbone (Javascript) for handling the data on the client

These are relatively simple to use tools, to get started quickly.

Also Ruby provides loads of gems to get started with user-accounts, etc.

The “Hello, World!” for Sinatra is pretty simple:

require 'sinatra'

get '/' do
  "Hello, World!"
end