Hello!
I'm working with a friend on a webapp that involves sending and receiving copious amounts of email. While the application does have a web-interface, this interface is mostly used for simple CRUD operations on data that comes in via email (text and binary attachments).
I wanted to get the opinion of folks here on what is the best technology stack to go about this.
1. Ease of programming is more important to me than scalability (basically, I'm the only developer on this one, and I want to do as many iterations as possible)
2. I have worked with Django/Python, Ruby/Rails, and C# (and sigh... with Java too), and I'm comfortable with all these frameworks/languages. Posterous (also email-heavy) seems to be using Rails (from their ngynx server).
If you've worked on a similar application, or would like to recommend a particular stack, please help me out! :)
Thanks!
I've had great success with nginx (load balancing, static serving) -> apache/wsgi/django (dynamic). Have a local postfix email server that handles the email sending requests rather than sending to a remote SMTP host - it will keep things snappy. Overall, it's a simple, easily scalable (horizontally) setup.
Of course, I am sure that RoR would work equally well in a similar configuration. Basically, if you're not worried about webapp performance, you can use any language that you're comfortable with and allows you to iterate quickly. For me, that language is Python.