OT: Getting CGI/Perl to run on a hard drive

[keko]

I used to work in a web development company (chief art director   ), and two of our biggest/oldest clients were (and still are) Banks. All the software ran on the servers IS Java-based. (jacarta tomkat serving)

...so Java is, indeed, a very stable, secure, scalable, flexible and powerfull language. I can't script a line of it, but I completely understood what my engeneer partners wrote.

On the other end, I learnt php in about a week. I've forgotten now, 'cause I quit that job  :shock: , but for the scripting needs a 'normal' web-freak like most of us have (besides checking this board 20 times a day), PHP is IMO, the way to go. Furthermore, using Flash+PHP+MySql can make cool cool cool things. So interaction server and client side IS possible.

[The Tone God]

I know about 20 different programming languages most of which are dead or too limited to be useful in modern time. Picking up when I learned C I moved on to C++ then Java. I've since moved back to C. Not to get into a OOP vs. procedural arrgument but both have good points.

Java was fun. I liked the updated language nominclature, the security concepts, and the *idea* of portabilty. The AWT/Swing was painful. I don't like what Sun is up to with it these days.

.NET is interesting too with some better and worse things when compared to Java. Its been three or four years since its come out. Has it taken over the market like M$ claim it would ? I haven't played with it but from my reading VB.NET just killed the few good things VB had going for it. I can't trust anything coming from M$ even with the Mono project around.

Nah I'll stick with C. I'm happy.

As for the web-based thing I'll throw my support behind PHP too.

Andrew

[travissk]

They all have their tradeoffs. Java is quite a bit different from where it was even 2 or 3 years ago; it's still not as easy as it could be to distribute a "click me and run" exe project, and because it tries to do everything you sacrifice a little bit of polish here and there, but it does what it tries to do very well now that it's been fleshed out.

In terms of design, Java is a very interesting language. I took a compiler class, and after our final projects were in (writing a compiler for a horrible language), we went over how it works on the inside - very interesting stuff. Java 1.5 (or Java 5? They're still deciding on the name) should add some pretty nice features. It's clean, not incredibly ambiguous, and the cross-platform aspects work moderately well.

As far as using it as a production language, I'd choose C++ most of the time. It's faster for speed-essential code, even though just-in-time stuff (Java, .NET) has its advangages. I programmed a project for a music class in C++ that used all the ASIO/VST SDKs, and for that sort of thing (and similar industry projects) you really have to use C++, both for use of existing APIs as well as speed.

Java has nicer error messages, though. It also seems a little more planned out in terms of having interfaces. Templates in C++ are both a useful tool and a design mess (i.e. compilation error with "vector<vector<int>>"). In an Operating Systems class we took, you have all quarter to put together a basic OS that does disk I/O, multitasking, interrupts, basic stuff. I can't tell you how many times one of us put a stray character at the top of a file and then gcc gave hundreds of error messages, none of which was in the right file.

Right now I'm a teaching assistant for an intro programming class, and using Java as an intro language is MUCH nicer than using C++ for reasons like these.

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On the server side of things, I've done mostly PHP, but started out on ASP (very simple stuff) and had some quick Perl and Java/JSP assignments in college, just to get experience with the various technologies (networking class). PHP remains my favorite of these to use... it just seems fun, whereas Perl seems more of a chore

My summer job is at an internet company, and they use the .NET framework for all the server-side stuff. There are some things that Java Server Pages and ASP can do that PHP doesn't "quite get", and they seem better 'enterprise' languages, for when you need a web solution and will run it on your hardware, etc. This work is in C# (at first they used Visual Basic), and from what I've done with that language so far, it's pretty nice.

For personal or small-scale stuff (i.e. stuff that your boss isn't telling you has to be done in C# ) I still prefer PHP. Well-designed, fast, efficient, portable, fun

Sorry for the really long off-topic post - I didn't intend to write that much :shock: