Java, Perl, etc.

Justin Buist jbuist at tridenttechnology.com
Wed Sep 26 15:59:36 CDT 2001


Long time lurker here... though I'd pipe up on the subject though.  Some
perl mongers I met at a Sun security summit at Calvin a while back got me
interested in the group.  Regretfully I never took the time to come to a
meeting of any sort but I've enjoyed the lively discussion on the list
lately.  Anyway... back to the point.

> Our web group was in the Publications Division until this summer and we
> chose our own course. So it was Perl and Oracle. We work primarily in
> the vi editor in Unix so there's your culture.

How archaic...  you should have dumped vi for vim a long time ago. :)

> happens. But I do know that a business with so much invested in graphic
> talent is pretty harsh when web sites aren't both graphically and
> functionally appealing.

As others have said what it comes down to is what kind of tasks must your
intranet perform?  As we all know some things are more cumbersome in Perl
which would be easier in Java and vice versa.  There's more than one way
to do a website in Java too.  I'll iterate through the stuff I've played
with and know about.

ColdFusion:
Great if you can't actually program and your website is nothing more than
DB queries.  It better be small too -- managing these CFML templates is a
bear once they become over a couple of hundred lines.  Functions don't
actually exist in this language so what I'd do it a single file in any
other language, if broken out into "tags", becomes 10-20 files.
Horrid.

Perl:
Nevermind, you all know the pros/cons to this one.

PHP:
Syntax reminds me of Perl; easy to learn... fairly well documented; good
user community around it too.  I like it; we converted a CF project to PHP
recently and did it blindingly fast.  Much faster than the oringal CF
development by about 1/4th.  Part of that was because the team changed
slightly by bringing out fastest ASP/VBScript guy onto the project and
making him learn PHP.  I like the way PHP works with Apache too, seems
like a much more stable and faster application server than CF.

ASP/VBScript:
Same category as PHP for me, though I'm not very well versed in it.  I
just don't like the way the language acts and it looks too much like VBA
while still being different.  Huge source of confusion for me but I'm
neither a good VBScript nor VBA programmer.


Java Servlets:
Nice model for "heavy lifting" sites.  You can pull in all sorts of XML
tools to get the job done and build nice packagable products out of it.
We're in the final stages of a project which was both Servlets and a Java
Application which shared common objects between the two of them.  Our
database -> PDF publication framework was originally going to be web based
using FOP (http://xml.apache.org/fop) but it was pulled over to the client
side application with little work.

Java JSP:
Inherits the ugly nature of a tag based framework like CF.  I just don't
agree with using a language as powerful as Java and intermingly it so
absurdly with the presentation layer.  It tries to abstract the two layers
apart but I've seen (and heard) that it's easy for programmers to just do
the wrong thing here.

I just have to ask though, why isn't PHP on the table here?

Justin Buist
Trident Technology, Inc.
4700 60th St. SW, Suite 102
Grand Rapids, MI  49512
Ph. 616.554.2700
Fx. 616.554.3331
Mo. 616.291.2612




More information about the grand-rapids-pm-list mailing list