The API is. By faaaaaaaaaar the most work is going to be to learn all the NS_xxx classes and how you write and plug together an IOS app. The language on which this is built is small in comparison. The libraries and APIs and things that you manipulate is where the action is.

Same goes for Java. the Java APIs are waay more work than Java, the language. If you learn Groovy or Clujure, which both run on the Java platform, you still need to learn the APIs or you won't achieve much.

And so on for Ruby and any other language.

That said, I would shoot for Swift if I was a beginnner.

No, Java was very heavily influenced by RoR. Before DHH said "Screw Java" J2EE was a seriously bad, complex mess. After lots of people went to RoR because it is such a PITA to write J2Ee (I was one) a lot of simplyfying went into J2EE which improved it.

I would agree on that.

I swear I did not think I would live to see the time where JavaScript was picked for performance...

BSD-Based, supports everything you want, great hardware...

And you also have to schlep out to Hamburg's airport, which takes 30 minutes. And check-in. Which takes another 30 minutes.

In München Franz-Josef-Strauss airport is about 40 minutes per train from the inner city. Which means you have ore than an hour to your final destination.

So that took about 2.5 hours + the hour flight. Sure a bit faster, but much, much more hassle.

This is the case, yes. As afar as I recall the noise has something to do with a shockwave when the trains enters or exits a tunnel.

Tunnels and shockwaves are also the reason the high-speed trains are pressurised. Deutsche Bahn (who also runs 300+ kph trains) advertised a while ago for a physicist who is an expert on shock waves.

Look at the value of an actual business. The hardware on which the database runs is cheap. The data is the product of all the work of all the people who worked there for the last 10-15 years, in the case of companies that do not manufacture things. Do you really think thay paying a couple of thousand Dollars even compensates for that? If you pay an average worked 60000 per year, and you have 200 of them, that is a 1.2 mil per year, and over ten years you gave out 120 million bucks. In comparison to that, the datastorage container is a joke.

My father had a one man business (a drugstore). He once moanes about eh price he had to pay for replacing his borked backup tape drive. Until I pointed out that if his HDD fails without a backup HE WILL LOSE HIS BUSINESS. He saw the light real quick.

Oracle is the same for medium to large businesses.

You must be joking, right? Postgres can kick MySQL's ass, sure, but Oracle? For seriously large sets and reliability? No way!

Thanks for keeping the OSS Oracle/Apple/MS haters in the real world. Oracle does have attributes that PostgreSQL can't match, for large datasets. The problem is that a almost none of the hackers here work with really large datasets. The other problem is that hardware is cheap. The data stored on them is so expensive as be irreplacable.

That said, I use PostgreSQL for most projects because I don't HAVE really large datasets (I have a lot of small ones).

Now Comic Sans will become CERN's official font.

"Send a rocket to explore the big bang"

Someone misunderstood the mission briefing.

What do they define as a "sign-up" site. This can range from simple to horrendously complicated. The large project I worked on was also a sign-up site but for a federated society with branches all over the world, and each of those branches had different membership rules and products that they wanted to sell through or with the part I worked on.

It can also be a get-your-name-and-put-it-into-a-database kind of deal, which is not complicated at all.

Like in all cases like this, it depends.

The question is, does the non-profit have salaried staff?. Or are all employees working without pay? There is a difference. I worked in both roles in different non-profits.

This question is not any different to any one that asks "Do I roll my own or do I buy?" All software must be customized, and you need to weight the costs of customization against the cost of writing your own thing which can involve lots of small details.

I once wrote a small speech scheduling web-app for our toastmasters club. Yeah we could have used the standard one, but it sucked. And I wanted to learn AJAX in Ruby on Rails so it was a good fit. And the program was pretty OK (and still is). But it is small and does not really need maintenance.

I also wrote a very extensive membership management system as a salaried employee for another non-profit. In hindsight, this was a mistake. The prime reason was that the non-profit was sponsored by Lotus Notes back in the 90s and Mr Senior Manager decided to write the MMS in Notes. This was a truly bad idea. There is nothing wrong with Notes as a workflow and Office management tool, and it worked very well in our org. But as a general swiss army knife web application platform it sucks so much that it bends space-time. Fine for small apps, disaster for medium and long-term maintainability. After I left (because of corruption) it took them 7 years to recover proper operations.

At the time the choice was politically correct because we wanted to show some love to our sponsor. In that case (this was the late 90s') a RDBMS actually cost money or was at least not even remotely as mature as they are now, so no having to pay for software infrastructure was a factor. Keep that in mind if you have to run a large project. Often you need to pay for tools, and in a non-profit case this is not necessarily viable. Getting things for free severely distorts the cost part of a cost-benefit analysis and beggars can't be choosers. In a non-profit decisions about capital expenditures are often much more political than a simple cost-benefits analysis would suggest.

I can give you one piece advice though: Whatever road you take absolutely concentrate on increasing the productivity of the volunteer at all other costs. You get way more bang for your few bucks that way.

Another last thing to watch: People who run a non-profit sometimes think they are saints and therefore god will look away if they steal. Because they think they are saving the world it can get to their heads. Watch for that, it can cause you a lot of grief.