I\'m redesigning the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org). Right now it
ID: 660799 • Letter: I
Question
I'm redesigning the William Blake Archive (www.blakearchive.org). Right now it consists of XML data (which won't change) that sits in an eXist database. The web application consists of xquery files that query the database and pass the results to XSLT stylesheets.
For the new site, I've indexed the data in Solr. Now I'm wondering what the best middleware language would be for this? Flask and Django, Python frameworks, aren't really suitable. I'm thinking of just using PHP to do the Solr queries and pass the results to new stylesheets. But is there a better middleware framework to use? In the end the new site needs have a much better look-and-feel and more streamlined browsing (navigation) features. I'm open to learning whatever language is best.
Explanation / Answer
Querying Solr could be done with various things.
If you want to use PHP, have a look into CakePHP, the Zend-Framework, Laravel, Codeigniter, Symfonie, or other PHP-Frameworks.
Then there is Ruby on Rails of course.
Those are, however, all solutions to do the server-side stuff. You would still need to do the frontend.
For this I would suggest to you to have a look into Bootstrap and Zurbs Foundation.
There are endless possabilities to achieve what you want and all are suitable. However, IMHO this is not a software-/tool-question.
As soon as you have looked deeper into one framework and compared them, Stackoverflow might be better suited for those questions, although this particular question is too much opinion-based.