To php or not..

[David Kramer]

Stephen Adler wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> I'm planing on developing a web based service 

Do you mean a "web service" or do you mean a website offering a service?

 > which will require PHP or
> some other type web front end with mysql db backend. The question I have 
> is whether I should dive into PHP or perhaps use python. Does anyone 
> have any experience using python? Or should I go all out and do a JBOSS 
> thing. (I'm not sure what JBOSS is, but I suppose its some kind of web 
> base middleware which allows you to write web content and interface with 
> a database back end.)

I'm a big fan of both PHP and Java Servlets.  I'm using both at work, 
though I host my servlets in Tomcat instead of JBOSS, because it's 
smaller and simpler, and I haven't needed the full J2EE enterprise beans 
thing yet.

I like python, but I have a hatred for it in web environments because my 
only experience with it was in an environment with RHEL4 (the only 
version cleared to go in this USAF data center), with accompanying 
ancient version of mod_python and we had to compile our own MySQLdb 
module to get it to work.  The whole thing was highly unreliable, and it 
was non-deterministic whether a change to the source code would change 
the website without deleting the compiled files and restarting Apache. 
I'm sure it's no longer like that, but you don't get over that kind of 
pain quickly.


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