Have you ever created (or at least started to) a portal, an AJAX-enabled web application or a high-traffic website? If you have, you know that the biggest issues are the speed, the debugging process and the scalability.

For those that didn’t dig into high-traffic or big web applications until now, let me tell you: when it comes to complex (or big) web applications, it can be extremely difficult to create, maintain, debug or scale them without proper tools or architecture.

My biggest challenge while the Chief Architect at Brainient was finding a technology / framework that would enable us to create fast, reliable and scalable web applications. We tried most of the web technologies, frameworks, CMS out there and after almost one year we decided to stick with just a few:

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Just a few days before I left on my Christmas vacation to Italy, I got together with one of my best friends in college. He’s now working for Microsoft, so I was really keen to have an “inside look” of the little Redmond company .

What I found out? Well, not much, ’cause of the non-disclosure agreement he signed, but enough to be able to draw some conclusions:

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