[seanrg_2000]

Unofficial survey...

There are many different server side technologies to choose from when developing and deploying web sites. Java, Server Side Javascript, CGI, PHP, etc.

So which do you use most often and why?

Personally, I use Java/JavaServer Pages/Servlets/Database connectivity. Why? I feel Java technologies are the most flexible in terms of maintenance and adaptability over time. Also, scripting technologies such as CGI have more overhead in spawning the CGI process.

So what's your vote?

Sean
Sacredpaws.net

[noliv]

I like PHP.
It's so simple to use and efficient enough for my needs (personnal home page...)

I don't know if it's good enough to be used in high trafic sites...

[funkboy]

Originally posted by noliv:
<STRONG>I like PHP.
It's so simple to use and efficient enough for my needs (personnal home page...)

I don't know if it's good enough to be used in high trafic sites...</STRONG>

My vote also goes for PHP. I know of a few high-traffic sites that run PHP finely with modest hardware.
I've been working with a technology called StoreBuilder (also goes by the name WebDNA) , recently, for a client. It's quite easy to use for what it does - making online stort automatically handles shopping carts and everything quite easily.. n't seen it used too many places. Anyone else have any experience with this technology?

[cteselle]

Currently PHP gets my vote... I have been using it for a couple of years now, and it is very powerful, yet simple.

[foamy]

I have to add another vote for PHP. Before OSX I had no idea how to script or program anything. I installed PHP/mysql and in very little time I was able to do lots of cool things. For example, I hate that Javascript rollovers can't remember what page you're one; that is if you have three links in a menu and when you mouseover them, they switch color and when you click on a link (say link1) you get the same menu back, with no feed back that you are now on link1.

link1
link2
link3

with PHP I do a simple if/else check to see what page I clicked and If I clicked link1, then the "mouseover" state now shows up


<font color = red>link1</font> &lt;-- the link I just clicked.
link2
link3

Anyway, a 'real' programmer would probably laugh at how I implemented this, but it is fast and works great.

Also, there is a vast quantity of free scripts and programs out there that do just about whatever you want... just sitting there waiting for the tweaking. e.g. http://www.hotscripts.com has thousands of PHP scripts.

[ReggieX]

PHP/MySQL for sure!
When I moved to my new host, I made all the pages on my site dynamic using very simple PHP code.
Now each page itself is very tiny and manageable: heck I could change the entire way the site looks and not even touch the content pages!

That's where dynamic technologies reign supreme. And of course, you can run them on OS X

Reg

[parallax]

If I had to choose for performance/ease, it would be PHP.

But, if I had to choose which one I'd rather code in, it'd be Perl by miles. It's such a cool language.

[Joshua]

I'll put another notch up for PHP.

[bushwhacker]

I almost feel silly even bothering adding this, but my vote most definitely is for PHP.

I'll touch on a couple of reasons why:

1) PHP is fantastically "web-centric". Next to "cold fusion" it is the most easily integrated with HTML. You can have a php page that is all HTML, and just throw in your &lt;? ?&gt; tags and get some dynamic content in there.

2) It's tremendously robust while still being "learnable" by the average mortal (one without formal programming training). It can support classes which can be used to make HUGE web products very efficiently.

I used to work for a professional e-business solution provider and we used PHP for our primary "turn-key solution" for e-business stores.

Beyond it's web use, it's nice to use for command line scripting as well. I have a few scripts written in PHP that manipulate the file system on my machine. It's very nice.

OK, I've sang enough praise now.

[hotani]

I will also sing the praise of PHP. I actually used perl first, then migrated all my scripts to php because it was so efficient at doing web based work. I still use perl, but just on the filesystem.

I wrote an entire self-contained article/discussion/poll website with php in a short amount of time, and am now adapting it to use MySQL instead of flat files. The integration of PHP with MySQL is amazing.

It also has a great online and downloadable manual (always a good thing!).

[sadie]

Guess what? I'm voting for PHP.

I learned Perl first, and used it for quite a long time. Recently tried PHP, and was shocked at just how easy and familiar it is. Everything is just smoother and nicer, exactly what you need when doing mock up sites in ten minutes.

So, it looks like you've got your answer!

Originally posted by funkboy:
<STRONG>...making online stort automatically handles shopping carts...</STRONG>

Assuming this means what i think it does, making online store that automatically handles shopping carts, this is a fascinating new contraction - splicing "that" into the previous word.

some guyt didn't give a... = some guy that didn't give a...
gruesome thingt makes your... = gruesome thing that makes your...

Could this be the future direction of the english language?

[sadie]

Okay, okay, i'm too nerdy for my graphite. Happy?

[Gee4orce]

PHP is fab - from what I've seen of it. But, my vote is for Perl here. Perl is just the most powerful language I've ever used, and I'm currently making a career out of being a Perl programmer, and the pay is good

Perl is definately harder to get into, has some very obscure syntax, but the power is simply unrivalled. Running with mod_perl eliminates the CGI overhead too.

..but saying that, for 90% of what people want to do with the web, PHP is ample.

Let's not turn this into a silly language wars either - I'm a Perl programmer, but I'll gladly use PHP if it suits the job. Java I'm a little iffy about, and ASP is the spawn of the devil. but - hey - live and let live.

[seanrg_2000]

Wow. Lots of PHP fans out there.

I guess the reason I tend to shy away from server side scripting is that its an interpreted environment. This [generally] means that each time a particular script is hit, it's interpreted all over again. While simple in design, for quickly putting together a series of dynamic pages, the performance under load isn't that great. For example, the UBB that MacNN uses is cgi based (unless they're using a different release than I'm familiar with). When OS X hit, the boards were in a state of perpetual 'meltdown' in trying to handle the load (I've seen it with other sites as well).

Java, when used with java server pages, and a backend database connection through jdbc is, IMHO, a more robust and scaleable environment. Through the use of custom tags on the jsp side of things, "obscure" java code can be hidden from designers which allows non java folks to handle the overall look and feel of a particular page without getting caught up in the logic part of the equation.

Just my 2bits.

Sean
Sacredpaws.net

[RubberDucky]

I'll cast a negative vote for PHP. It's not bad for personal home pages and low volume sites, but it doesn't scale at all and tries to build *too* much into the scripting language that should be handled with server components.

That being said, my votes would go to ASP.NET and JSP. Both have the same advantages over PHP (scripts are compiled, easy access to server components, etc). ASP.NET would get my overall vote due to it's language neutrality. Those of you who like Perl can write in Perl, I can write in C#, and people who like JScript can use that. That fascinates me.

JSP is limited to Java, which I don't particularly like, but it's quite powerful and scales very well.

[funkboy]

Originally posted by sadie:
quote:
-------------------------
Originally posted by funkboy:
...making online stort automatically handles shopping carts...
-------------------------
Assuming this means what i think it does, making online store that automatically handles shopping carts, this is a fascinating new contraction - splicing "that" into the previous word.

some guyt didn't give a... = some guy that didn't give a...
gruesome thingt makes your... = gruesome thing that makes your...

Could this be the future direction of the english language?[/QB]

I believe I may have invented something here! Apparently my G3 just can't keep up with my super-fast typing!
We could extend this to multiple words:
t for that, w for who/whom, b for belong:
Tow doest dogb? = To whom does that dog belong? (ick, that could be a bad sentence too... eh, we're already morphing the language)
...or just change English to PHP!

[Raman]

I think the reason that most people like PHP is they can program it on their MacOSX box... and it's free and easy to set up with MySql.

I prefer PHP over ASP. I'm a closet PHP hacker like most of us.

I don't know JSP to give an opinion on it.

I can barely spell PERL... just enough to laugh when people spell it PEARL.

I do ASP at work. It has been very useful to know PHP because I see how stupid ASP is. I'm trying to do more of my ASP code in JScript since VBScript is slow and doesn't have nearly as many functions, esp when it comes to arrays and text manipulation.

ASP isn't totally evil. Most people hate it because they're ignorant of the fact that you can write it in JScript (ECMAscript if you really hate M$). At that point it's really not that bad. And fortunately, since it breaks so often, I have a job. Go M$!

After you get beyond the initial learning stages of a scripting language you realize that other things like template based sites, good database design, etc... determines performance more than the language that you're using. If you're a good programmer you'll write robust (error checking) code and degrade gracefully when it crashes (i.e. no "on error resume next" sh*t in your scripts).

For most sites, I don't really think it matters. For enterprise sites it matters enough that you need to stress test and find the weakest links and bottlenecks - alot of the time its things that you never thought of like the fact that the SAP database is in the West coast while your Oracle database is on the East coast and you realize it's not your code.. it's the latency talking to the databases.

Anyway.. yeah, PHP's good. Unfortunately I work for a M$ Shop. Fortunately my shop (www.coastaldev.com) is not M$ only.

[Kristoff]

Java for sure.
Java provides a complete package...an end-to-end solution for enterprise computing.
If all your are doing is displaying dynamic content and tapping into a database, then those other tools are ok.
But for non-trivial widely distributed enterprise applications, Java is the way to go.
But, like I said, not everyone needs that kind of power.

[peterthorn]

Having experience with ASP & PHP, I have to cast my vote for PHP.
Both the ease of use, a lot of good dev. sites around and the constant improvement does the trick.
And, as a bonus, one's not limited to lousy M$ servers and their low uptime.
I'm though definitely planning to look more into Perl & JSP

[AlbertWu]

Definitely perl. Having very little knowledge of PHP, I probably should not be saying this, but I like perl because it is versatile and does all kindsa stuff (like run this forum. )

[Gee4orce]

UBB is not slow because it's written in Perl. Nor is it slow because it's run as a CGI script (although that doesn't help).

It's slow because it's badly written - at least when I took a peek at the nightmare ASCII explosion that Infopop call code, a year or so ago.

I must be a talented programmer - I can write a slow program in any language

[MadBrowser]

I switched my company from doing our sites in PHP to J2EE (Java: JSP+Servlets+EJB+JMS...).

There were a couple of reasons:

1. Java is OO. PHP's support of OO is a joke. There is no true OO in PHP, it's more like C structs with functions in 'em... Lame. We use OO extensively to build our application frameworks.

2. Java scales much better. We can run large clusters of machines with automatic session failover. If you're shopping on my site and the server you were on crashes, another server in the cluster can pick it up and your cart is intact. PHP only natively supported sessions as of version 4 and the support is still akward.

3. Java is type-safe. You can run everything through a compiler and catch a lot of stupid typing mistakes. I haven't used the PHP compiler (if it's even out yet) so this may be a mute point.

4. The Java API rocks! There are packages for everything! PHP does have quite a few useful functions but the API naming standard is totally screwed up. Try porting an app from one database to another. With Java you change the JDBC connection string. With PHP you have to change ALL the function calls, and they take differents args!! I guess PEAR is attempting to address this.

Anyway, we're very happy that we moved most of our sites. We pump out about 2 million page views per day... One site is still on PHP, though it is being converted soon.

[sjdownes]

I'll vote for JSP/Servlets for now (my team is transitioning to J2EE over the next 6 months).

I have to say though that JSP (like ASP and PHP) requires way too much mixing of HTML and real code. HTML developers should be able to safely own the HTML deliverable without having any Java knowledge or awareness. Java developers shouldn't have to muck about in HTML. JSP taglibs fill this role, but they're still a little bit of a hassle for the HTML developer. A clean separation of roles (designer, HTML developer, Java developer, DBA, Sys Admin) is a major issue in larger team environments.

Now if you're building everything by yourself, you can make a good argument for using PHP. The real issue though is scalability -- not only "Can we keep it running as well when we have ten times as many users?" but also "Does site maintenance become a major problem when we have ten times as many developers working on the site?"