I have to come up with a working backend in a few months. It's going to have users, super users, and admins and generate content based on what people are logged in as. I'll probably be pulling and entering data to/from an SQL database and generating a page.

Whats the best to use these days? It seems every site i like uses something different. This site uses asp, another uses cgi, and i have always been around php.

Aside from your general argumentative politics of open source vs proprietary, which one is the way to go?

12/11/2008 11:27:13 PM

If you've always been around PHP, then use PHP.

Otherwise, if you're using a Linux server, use PHP.
If you're using a Windows server, use ASP.

12/11/2008 11:33:05 PM

Wrong way to frame the argument.

Go look at packaged systems that do what you want, then look at their technologies. Then you can do an analysis between them on cost of implementation, upkeep and scalability.

CGI isn't a language. You mean Perl?

12/11/2008 11:33:06 PM

php.

for something as simple as that, however, work with whatever language you're most comfortable using.

if you aren't comfortable with any of them, i'd suggest learning php.

12/11/2008 11:52:24 PM

Java Servlets look pretty cool, but in my experience it's been a bitch to set up an environment for it initially

CGI bin is also pretty dank, fast and flexible, but depending on the language of choice may have some development overhead

ASP does not get you street cred, PHP is lukewarm

12/12/2008 7:54:12 AM

go with what you know

if you don't know any of them, php is pretty much the easiest programming language ever

12/12/2008 8:09:42 AM

COLDFUSION

oh, wait...

12/12/2008 8:44:39 AM

I agree with Noen, read up on all the CMS's out there and pick one that you can set up yourself in a day and be done with it. They can pretty much all do all the things you're mentioning.

If you need something ultra-lightweight and want to do it yourself, there's no reason not to stick with what you know and use PHP.

12/12/2008 12:03:29 PM

Quote :

"Java Servlets look pretty cool, but in my experience it's been a bitch to set up an environment for it initially "

If you mean the config of the servlet container, tomcat is easier to configure than apache. Its also pretty easy to get it integrated into eclipse and there are plenty of walkthrough docs.

As for GUI frameworks, faces is fucking awful, but something like echo3 (demo) is pretty nice on the client side and pretty easy to program if you already understand swing.



Also, I hate php.

12/12/2008 11:42:46 PM

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/

12/13/2008 9:05:28 AM

^^getting Eclipse and all the plugins to work was something of a bitch and required a version quest to locate a compatible combination of Eclipse and Java installs

I haven't really had any issues w/ Tomcat specifically

[Edited on December 13, 2008 at 9:13 AM. Reason : ^]

12/13/2008 9:13:02 AM

I'd go with Tomcat write out your service layer to generator something one of the frontend technologies can easily use. GWT has a set of classes that extend the functionality of Servlet and is nice to work with--I used it from concept to end product. Flex is nice for the front end as well. Ext-JS is fairly nice, but I don't have much experience with it. It seems to have easy hooks for JSON on your back end. You could use anything you wanted for that.

The packaged route also works.

[Edited on January 6, 2009 at 9:03 PM. Reason : a]

1/6/2009 9:03:00 PM