cgi vs. php vs. asp vs. other

[helppls]

what do you prefer and why? i'm really into perl, but im new to the whole web-proggraming scheme.

 

[FOBSIDE]

ColdFusion because its easy. thats the only reason. its powerful but i wouldnt say its better than anything else out there. its expensive which is a downside to the other ones which are free. but they have coldfusion at my work so i do it.

 

[Damascus]

PHP since it's almost exactly like C.

 

[DaveSimmons]

perl if a unix/linux box, ASP or maybe ASP.Net if working on an NT/W2K box. Though I wouldn't recommend NT/W2K for a high-traffic situation 🙂

 

[Nothinman]

I saw this writeup from www.everything2.com on ColdFusion and couldn't help but pass it on:



<<
After being professionally employed writing ColdFusion for the past two years, here's my moderately informed opinion.

ColdFusion is the single best web-scripting language choice for an uneducated user with a small task at hand (that is, if you don't mind shelling out several hundred bucks to complete this small task). CFML is terribly easy to learn, and handles all the everyday tasks you'd expect from a web-scripting language. This allows you to get yourself in trouble very quickly. Why?

1. ColdFusion is slow. How slow? Like, Short bus slow . Slow enough that you need to be wary of loops that iterate more than 1,000 times. That's pretty fcking slow for 2001. This doesn't even mention query times, which leads us on to:

2. A typical ColdFusion corporate setup is to have CF as the web-scripting language and MS SQL Server as the database. How do these two communicate, you ask? ODBC. Which is really fcking slow. Like, Cousin no one in your family ever talks about slow.

3. A marketing department was obviously heavily involved in ColdFusion's development. How do I know? Simple things like for loops are sort-of implemented, but in what someone obviously thought was a "user-friendly" way. Here's a typical for loop:

for(int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
foo++;
}

Now here's the ColdFusion version:

<cfloop index=i from="0" to="9">
<cfset foo = #foo# + 1>
</cfloop>

ColdFusion does this sort of thing a lot, basically trumping typical programming language conventions. What this means for you: If you're new to the world of programming, all the assumptions you'll learn from ColdFusion are subtly, annoyingly wrong.

4. ColdFusion offers very little to help you, the programmer, manage complexity. At this time ColdFusion has reached release 5.0, and just now got around to giving users the ability to write functions. This lack of structure is where third parties come in, with products like the Fusebox method, but rote technique means little if your medium is crap.

If you're attempting to build a medium-large application with ColdFusion, you're looking at a minefield. You could, very easily, hire a bunch of schmoes from the local community college to learn CFML and write your application. Things would progress very rapidly, in the beginning. Given a bit of time and a few minor revisions, you'd be left with a grinding, slow application that was a nightmare to maintain. This is where you'd hire someone like me (at a mildly exorbitant rate) to come in, and essentially re-write your app from the ground up, in ColdFusion. Alternately, you could just hire me right away, but then what's the point of using ColdFusion?

Or you could just do it right, hire some programmers who know what they're doing, and build the thing with PHP. Which is what I'd have told you to do in the first place.
>>



My work converted an intranet employee search page from something (not sure, I'm not in their dept) to ColdFusion recently and I can attest that it's noticably, and annoyingly, slower. And these forums are pretty f'ing slow, I realize there's bandwidth caps (which I think is realy gay too) but it's noticably slower during peak hours.

I personally like Perl because I know it fairly well already, but php is supposed to be extremely good too.

 

[Sestar]

Java, go for it as its a complete and full solution. You have java itself(great middleware, shiny applets). And you have JSP(PHP equivalent only quicker to code and more powerful). You also have servlets which are a great alternative to CGI(Trust me much better, and more efficient, java spawns threads not processes with servlets.)

 

[FOBSIDE]

<< Java, go for it as its a complete and full solution. You have java itself(great middleware, shiny applets). And you have JSP(PHP equivalent only quicker to code and more powerful). You also have servlets which are a great alternative to CGI(Trust me much better, and more efficient, java spawns threads not processes with servlets.) >>



how much would i have to learn to learn the simple ins and outs of jsp if i already know java?

 

[kritikal]

i'm definately a php fan.

here's why:

security: cgi/perl requires a lot of work to make sure scripts are secure. php generally is a much more
secure platform for simple and complex scripts.

documentation: php.net. nuff said. if you haven't seen it, go take a look. the function search is the best thing to
happen to programming (sorta). =)

speed: php serves up 10 pages for every 1 page that asp can serve up. i believe it's something like 3 to 1 for cgi/perl. 5 to 1 for jsp if memory
serves me correctly.

cost: it's free! use apache and postgresql and everything is tight! (i, of course, ignore all those that say 'you get what you pay for!' i also believe in free software (yea cs major!).

 

[Sestar]

If you already know java its same syntax(php and perl are diffrent) and its basically very very very easy to learn. I dont know about those speed statistics however, I know servlets mop the floor of CGI because they spawn threads not processes(and dont use CGI when you can use servlets, CGI is pure evil). JSP is also good with javabeans and has JDBC which is damn robust.