I have an idea for a relativly simple website I wish to set up for myself, my family and friends before rolling it out to the world and making my millions 8)

It’ll be a database backend and a simple frontend (I’m no UI designer!).

I don’t really have much web development experience, but I am a software engineer by trade albeit normally developing non web applications (C, C++ & Java).

So, web application frameworks seem to offer some support for rapid development.

I have had a look at Django, as I have written some python scripts in the past, but does anyone care to recommend anything else? Is it worth learning Ruby on Rails like all the cool kids?

C# and .NET?

you can get the Pro version of Visual Studio for free now and MS SQL Server web edition is pretty fully featured and free too.

C#, .NET, Entity Framework, bootstrap. You’ll have something presentable in no time.

Ooo, meant to say Linux development and deployment idealy.

I’ve heard good things about meteor. Also flask.

C#, .NET, Entity Framework, bootstrap. You’ll have something presentable in no time.

Agreed, but have to give a huge vote for AngularJS which kind of supports / extends bootstrap but isn’t quite the same thing. It’s a tremendous way to develop web front-ends – testable, dependency injection etc.

Django is pretty good. I’ve used it commercially and was productive in a couple of weeks starting from no Python experience. It is for all purposes the same as Rails (and ASP.NET MVC for that matter), so if you already are Python literate save yourself the bother of learning a new language (even though I prefer Ruby).

Anyway, the cool kids gave up on Rails in favor of Node/Mongo/Angular I believe.