[thelist] Recommend a Server Side Language?

[Philippe Jadin]

> I'm now looking for a simple, widely used server side language which is
easy
> to learn.  All I want to do is be able to process some forms, maybe do a
> simple auction etc.


Hopefully noone will be able to answer this. You have to test any
recommended langage and find which one suits your needs.

Imho, a good language needs :

-cheap or free (else I won't learn it) ideally opensource.
-supported by a large community (widely used)
-powerfull enough
-suported by cheap hosting / free hosting
-have decent docs.

So :

- ASP is relatively cheap, but you are tied to microsoft. Hosting is
relatively cheap. Have no idea about the stability, but I didn't "feel" it
when I saw some code snippets.
- Coldfusion : seems to be not really cheap. Maybe you can get a free server
for developement, but don't forget you'll need a full featured webserver.
(or your hosting company will, raising the hosting costs). As asp, I didn't
like this much the idea of "<cf>" tags.
- Perl : seems quite cryptic to read. If I don't understand the sources very
quickly, I feel either stupid or the tool is too complex for me.
- PHP looked quite good, free, cheap hosting available, and the code seemed
"readable".

I discovered php a year ago, and still use it because it's quite easy to
learn and it works very well. The community is *huge*. You'll find a script
for anything. If you want a good idea, goto http://www.hotscripts.com .I'm
pretty sure there is a php section for auction scripts.

If you want a good idea of the popularity of a language, goto hotscript and
see which one has the biggest area of scripts.

To tell you the truth I won't use any of those anymore because I discovered
Zope (http://www.zope.org)* a month ago. I know, it is not really well
known, it's not as easy to find cheap hosting. The community is smaller than
the one, for instance, of php.

But I don't care because I think zope is the perfect fit for me and I still
believe it's the next Big Thing.

This long msg to say that it's better to test more than one tool, and check
again in a few months to verify if there is nothing better suited for *you*.

Philippe Jadin
www.123piano.com



* If anyone needs to read one thing about zope, read this (I have been
convinced):

Zope - a Swiss Army Knife for the Web?
http://www.bris.ac.uk/ISC/zope/vine/vinezope.html