My kingdom for a host...
Some time ago the word "Django" was being bandied around our office. At the time I don't think I'd even toyed around with Python and after looking ever so briefly at the (really rather excellent, in hindsight) tutorial, abandoned any further exploration. While I'm still not convinced of the virtues of Python, it does seem that a number of groovy applications do tend get written in it, Django among them. I forget why but I did end up going back to it and, over the course of a few days, wrote an app. for managing my digital comic book collection (blessed be Comixology).
Inspired by the apparent simplicity of the whole Model-View-Template-Controller-Thingummy whatnot, I recently decided to work with Microsoft's MVC for another website. Similarly, developing sites is a relative breeze. There are the usual pitfalls of not getting your models right the first time and playing with the nuances of the language but in a fraction of the time normally taken, I had a fully functioning website. Well, sort of...
This is where everything seems to run aground: deployment. I had the same problems working with Django: trying to deploy the project locally with WSGI was trouble enough but trying to get it deployed to a shared webhost using FastCGI and with little control over the infrastructure? That took almost as long as developing the project. I'm running into similar issues with MVC. Visual Web Developer Express is a nice, free (as in beer) tool for development and runs effortlessly with its own internal web server but try to deploy it locally to IIS? Using MySQL? Nope, no such luck. Trying to deploy it to an actual webhost is the stuff of which nightmares are made.
I suppose it's my own fault for not giving adequate thought to that last hurdle but surely it needn't be this difficult?
