How to choose the right web application framework?

Question

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks

Since we are ambitiously aiming to be big, scalability is important, and so are globalization features. Since we are starting out without funding, price/performance and cost of licences/hardware is important. We definitely want to bring AJAX well present in the web interface. But apart from these, there's no further criteria I can come up with.

I'm most experienced with C#/ASP.net, PHP and Java, in that order, but don't turn down other languages (Ruby, Python, Scala, etc.).

How can we determine from the jungle of frameworks the one that suits best our goal?

What other questions should we be asking ourselves?

Reference material: articles, book recommendations, websites, etc.?

Answer 1

For me, the most important things to consider were:

• Fantastic lead developers who I trust to keep working on the project.
• Googling a question brings a lot of good answers.
• Most importantly, I have to like the way the code flows.
• Edit: Also they have to be anal about coding standards. If there is inconsistency, I get very annoyed.

Those 3 points brought me to Symfony. It is always using the latest cutting edge features of the latest PHP version. Symfony 2.0 is using namespaces before any other framework.

Two of your points were:

• i18n - there is great support for it (helps that the company behind it is French, so i18n is a first class citizen).
• Scales - Yahoo Answers and Vimeo use Symfony and contribute back code. If those guys can scale Symfony to 100 million users, you can too :)