Debating web development toolsets

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 10:39:21AM -0500, Alex Beamish wrote:
> In addition to Richard's excellent post, also keep in mind how large a
> team you are working with, and what resources you can rely upon
> outside that team. My situation is that I'm the only web developer at
> my company, which means that for any web type challenges I have to
> rely on places like Perlmonks [1] and the #perl and #apache IRC
> channels. Don't necessarily make your choice based on technology --
> also think about how you're going to be able to get support and
> feedback for it.
> 
> Also think about trying something simple in a couple of languages, and
> see how you do. You might find that you love PHP; you might discover
> that RoR is really difficult (I haven't used it myself, I'm just
> throwing out ideas here). Try as many options as possible and see what
> works for you.
> 
> I liked Perl pretty well from the start, because it really did 'fit my
> brain' .. but in addition to that, CPAN [2] is a great resource of
> software modules that are tested, pre-packaged and ready to go; and
> there is a local user group, the Toronto Perlmongers [3] with their
> own mailing list and monthly get-togethers. And I've progressed from
> ugly CGI scripts in 1998 that contained HTML code to really nice
> web/database applications written using CGI::Application and
> Template::Toolkit running under mod_perl.
> 
> And I loved the earlier quote about how "There are a number of rabid
> old school fans of Perl, but it's been supplanted by PHP." .. Perl is
> actually alive and well; version 5.10 was just released last month --
> Perl's not disappearing any time soon. :) Really. No, Perl 6 isn't
> ready yet, but work continues .. and in the mean time, Perl (5.8 or
> 5.10) is a great language to use. And I hope that doesn't sound too
> rabid. ;)
> 
> Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Well personally I do lots of perl, especially for web pages at work, and
I really hate perl.  The more I use it, the less I like it.

PHP I find to be a lovely language for web pages, but just like perl you
have to be careful not to make security holes.

I have played a bit with python recently, and it is very nice.  I wish I
had looked at it sooner.  Lots of nice libraries and such too.  No idea
how their CGI libraries are since I haven't looked at them, but if it is
anything like the rest of python it might be what I would use next time
I do some web page thing that isn't at work.

--
Len Sorensen
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