To php or not..

[Stephen Adler]

It's a web site offering services. It may evolve into a web site 
offering a web service as in some kind of soap interface providing some 
kind of low level functionality. Some of the requirements will be some 
kind of user login feature through username/password, and basic check 
boxes, radio buttons, text entry etc. Of course the db back end is 
needed to store data the user will be filling in through the forms etc.

I've done a PHP/MySQL application in the past... back in 1998 or so, and 
was pleased with the results I got from it. The thing I didn't like was 
the clumsiness of PHP syntax, but it did do want I needed. I'm now 
thinking of adopting python as my main coding language, deferring any 
c++ stuff for very basic low level work. If I'm on my python learning 
curve, I was wondering what it could do for me in putting together a web 
site providing a service.

 From everyones input, there's a lot out there! As expected... :) My 
only problem now is to try and choose between this pethora of choices... 
I feel like I'm in the supermarket in the cereal isle looking to get 
some kind of granola...

Thanks for everyones input. Cheers. Steve.

David Kramer wrote:
> 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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