I have been tasked with the development of a web based application for a non-profit organization. The application is not very complex but will solve many problems in their operations. I have been pondering about which technology to use for the application.

My first instinct, of course, was to use WebObjects (WO), my first love. However the thought of not having too many people to support the technology came to mind and I promptly dropped the thought. Then I thought about PHP. The people I knew who knew PHP were taking a break so that didn't work out either.

I then thought about J2EE / Java Frameworks. I got a couple of friends to commit to some time and started off. I prepared a detailed Functional Design document and some complicated project plans and got started. The only problem was none of us was full time on this. Plus J2EE projects need tremendous amounts of discipline and patience. For example, you might need to refer to up to like a million XML based configuration files and another couple of million of other files - all this just to figure out the flow for the Login use case!!

Give me WO any day!

I have, for the time being, decided to use WO. Let the first phase be completed. Let us get the ball rolling. Once we have a working application being used, we can slowly start building the complete application using a technology that has more people to support it.

Unfortunately, in the software world, more developers = better technology!