Question

I’m developing an app that is essentially going to pull data from a ton of different sources (twitter, facebook, github, basecamp, stackoverflow, etc.) and aggregate it all into a useful interface. Everything is going to need to be real-time.

I’m thinking that the majority of the app will avoid database usage – so the data I pull isn’t going to be stored, it’ll just be repulled and formatted everytime a user needs it. Obviously there is going to be a lot of AJAX involved and a lot of grabbing data from different APIs.

I’m most skilled in PHP, but I often times find it to be clunky, especially with this sort of thing. What language or framework would be the cleanest for pulling this kind of data so often, and quickly parsing it for the user? I know my way around Node.js and Ruby, but am very open to learning a new language/framework if need be.

Answer 1

all popular web languages are fine, but, i’d vote for node.js for the following reasons:

1. you know it.
2. easy for async networking to 3rd party services such as stackoverflow
3. your system won’t be so snappy and node.js can handle many simultaneous clients.

php you know too and has curl that can do multi get to solve 2. but that won’t help you with 3. ruby is in the same boat as php.