>Well, the nice thing on the Web is if you're building a service based application nobody has to know or care what you're using as long as the app works, is stable and can scale.

I want to agree with you - but my experience was not the best (it could be that I'm not the best programmer). I created a restful API using Django. As long as you were using the API all was perfect. But I was adding to an existing desktop app - meaning the database was accessed by both the restful API and desktops. I believed that the API was nothing more than one more user accessing data. I did everything in transactions - thought I was using the best multi-user tools to protect data. But:

I did not write the desktop side and I had little insight as to how it was accessing data. That is where I ran into trouble. I soon discovered I had a concurrency issue. I ended up rewriting my API and placing more code outside of the database (removed functions/store procedures) to help test for issues with 'try' and 'except'. That was a total surprise. It now works but I still don't know the root cause. All the testing was perfect until it went into product along side of the desktop app.

Anyway, that's what happen to me.

Johnf