Re: Web application: Programming language/Framework: Summary

I can heartily recommend the Template Toolkit if you go with a perl based
solution. I also strongly suggest not writing your own from scratch. It's
not simple at all to build a web based application server. We used the
Template Toolkit as the base for an ecommerce centric application server
(shopping cart) and it took us 6 months of development to add on everything
we needed (granted we added quite a bit). If we had not started with a
solid base like Template Toolkit, we could have added on another year easily
by the time all the bugs were worked out.

Mason is the other perl application platform I would suggest, and it's
actively developed and used on some very large sites. The main reason we
chose the Template Toolkit is because the template language is more similar
to php/asp, so our clients that use it don't have as much of a learning
curve. I wasn't personally impressed with the remaining perl based web
application frameworks when compared to Template Toolkit and Mason. They
seem to be pretty far ahead of the rest in most areas.

Personally I just don't like PHP compared to the alternatives, but that's my
own bias which is probably rooted in misinformatin, but I can live with
that:)

I do like Python. We dont' use it that much at, but we have used Zope which
is a very nice platform and it is written in Python.

Java is just too much for most small/medium sized applications. I like
Java, but it requires more resources all the way around. Java programmers
charge more, it takes more development time than say php, perl, or python to
accomplish the same thing, and in my experience it's just flat out more
expensive to develop and maintain a java application.

aolserver and tcl are nice, but there are a lot more people using
perl/python/php, which means more resources are available for those
languages any way you look at it.

Chris

> Arthur> And I can assure you that there
> Arthur> are many many more frameworks around. So many that I wonder
whether I
> Arthur> shouldn't just write my own, it must be very simple that almost
> Arthur> everyone has done so.
>
> If I can give you some insight from the Perl world (where there are 57
> different templating systems and counting)...
>
> It's very *easy* to start a framework. It gets harder to hit that
> 80/20 point, where you're using it more than fiddling with it. It
> gets *really* hard to make it general enough for others to use it
> outside your direct range of experience.
>
> For example, TemplateToolkit (on which OpenFrame is based, and
> Bricolage will at least nod to, and on which Slashcode depends) took a
> hella lot of work, and thus begins to be the thing everyone can use.
>
> --
> Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777
0095
> <merlyn(at)stonehenge(dot)com> <URL:http://www.stonehenge.com/merlyn/>
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