[thelist] Recommend a Server Side Language?
Philippe Jadin
philippe.jadin at 123piano.com
Tue Apr 10 16:15:31 CDT 2001
> 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
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