Well, I’ll throw my foot into my mouth - it’s only been a few days since the last event, so why not? ;-)

Keith had some good comments. I’ll mutter a bit about my personal experiences with various approaches (languages I’ve used and my feelings about them, mainly):

I’ve used Perl, RoR (Ruby on Rails), and Python now for developing various ‘simple’ web things (well, the latest excursion was a database query/search system designed to allow searching the test results of any number of different test processes - at one level not simple, but at another pretty simple ;-)

I’m preparing to (start all over on) work on a ‘little’ system for Ham Radio people to be able to find knowledgeable people who are willing to help them with whatever part of ham radio they are needing help with.  It will have a searchable database, logins, emails sent as a result of requests (along with some sort of validation of user initiating the requested email), automatic verification of email addresses on a scheduled basis, probably other stuff I forget right now.

Having used Perl, RoR, and Python I’m going to be writing it using Python and Django.  (I have already written the first 2 90%’s of the application in Perl (actually, the first 90% was done in bash, now that I think of it, so that means I’ve done three of the 90%’s of the job (*)), and never could quite get the database access right.  I’ve now used Django for that database thing, as well as a little ‘lunch voting’ application we use to decide where to go for lunch on Friday.  So, yeah, I guess I must recommend it ;-))

Never tried PHP, so take my comments above with a couple of spoons worth of salt ;-)

Details that may or may not be helpful, and which are CLEARLY IMHO (and could easily start a language flame war - please, if you think you need to flame about the below do it privately.  If you then feel like you need to email me, feel free, but leave the group out unless it is positive and helpful!)

IMHO, Perl is REALLY nice for heavy pattern matching stuff.  Database access in Perl gave me a VERY hard time, YMMV! Without really meaning to, almost all my database stuff  has moved to Python, since its really pretty easy, plus you get all the pattern matching stuff (although a bit differently - read that as ‘learning curve warning’ for Perl programmers  J)

RoR has some, to me, weird rules on what page you can go to next.  I never could get it to reload the same page after someone asked to resort the columns.  Probably my error, and maybe the documentation is better now, but there you have it.

Python with Django, once you get used to changing your urls.py file after adding a new page, works pretty nicely for me.  Expect to have to use templates, even if you don’t think you will.  They let you do some pretty nice things even if you don’t care about CSS and heavy eye kandy.  (Actually, they are pretty much required if you want to really use Django effectively, IMHO).

Bash - easy to test without a web browser.  I haven’t used this for web stuff in a LONG time.  If I had a compute intensive thing I’d probably use Python and ‘shell out’ to a C or C++ program for the CPU intensive stuff)  (Or maybe look at PHP, what with Jon and Keith’s comments)

Java - been using Java for a disk test system.  Have not tried any web-based stuff for it.  If you know C++ you shouldn’t have too much trouble picking up Java, but beware there are subtle but critical differences (and, of course, the terms are similar but different…). I have learned to hate the ‘one class per file, and the names must match’ rule, but oh well that’s just me.

Seeing Jon’s comments re-iterating Keith’s PHP comments, maybe I’ll have to take a look at PHP…

Note that my attitude about languages has a large impact on how I view C vs C++ vs Java vs Python vs APL.  If you think that Java and C++ are completely different languages then please ignore my comments above, as they will probably not help you at all!

And, FINALLY, an explanation, of sorts:

(* - “I’m 90% done - it only took 3 weeks!  Good, the other 10% will only take another 3 weeks!” ;-)  Aka “I’m 90% done, now I’ve only got the OTHER 90% left to do!”

Rusty

From: plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of keith smith
Sent: Monday, June 24, 2013 7:43 AM
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: OT: How to embed or call a shell script in an html file?