Single technology stack vs. multiple technologies for high scale site

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

I have recently been come to for advise on an idea of rewriting an existing site due to massive maintenance problems in their old design.

Basically, the company is considering a complete rewrite of aprox. 90% of their site which is currently written in PHP using an in-house framework.

The company would like to rebuild the backend and some way down the road the front-end as well in order to minimize their maintenance problems and make it easier to bring in new tallent which doesn't need to spend months">months learning the architecture before they can become affective developers.

We've come up with several possible architectures, some involving rewriting the whole site using an existing scripting web framework such as Cake, Django or RoR and some compiled language frameworks in Java or even .Net. In addition we have come up with some cross technology solutions - such as a web application built in Django with a Scala backend.

I was wondering what merit would there be to using a single technology stack (such as RoR) as apposed to using a cross between two (such as RoR with Scala, like Twitter now do) and vise versus.

Take into consideration the fact that this company's site is a high traffic site with over 1 million unique visitors a day, which will be transitioned onto the new architecture slowly over a long period (several month to a year)...

Thanks

manpreet 2 years ago