Re: Languages and backends.

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Joakim Ziegler wrote:

> I have a couple of recommendations and opinions, just to start this off. I
> think Auto* and WML should be dropped. People have problems making it work,
> and problems adding new stuff to the makefiles properly, etc. The build
> frequently breaks (because web developers usually aren't software developers
> with Auto* experience) which again makes it hard for other people to push
> their updates, etc. WML is, in my opinion, a hacked-together multipass mess
> which offers little benefit as compared to on the fly generation of pages.
>
> My first hunch is to use PHP for everything. This has a number of advantages;
> PHP is very easy to integrate with HTML, it's fast (especially PHP4, which is
> running on the new GNOME web server), a lot of people know it, and so on.
> It's also fairly easy to integrate with other languages where necessary.

I agree completely. There are reasons why PHP is popular and one of them 
is that it is incredibly easy to learn and start working with, and at 
the same time very powerful.


> Of course, that leaves Gnotices, which is running on Zope now, and would be
> hard to transition to PHP, I think. Some people have suggested going for Zope
> for the entire site, which might be an interesting thought. I have to admit,
> I don't know Zope well enough to have a good opinion on this, although what
> I've seen of Zope looks a little complex.

No kidding?
I had a look at Zope and Squishdot this summer (before I went on with 
PHP and Thatware) and I could never really figure it out. Mentioning 
Zope and "a little complex" in the same sentence is IMHO a serious 
understatement ;-)


> Python is a much nicer language than PHP, though.

I don't know about Python, I have heard horror stories about mandatory 
indentation though... ;-)

But I think that most people with web programming experience having 
experience with PHP is a big plus for PHP, contrary to Python.


Christian



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Christian Rose
http://www.menthos.com                    	    menthos menthos com
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