[KLUG Members] Scripting language

[Adam Williams]

> Here's the key line of your request:
> "I have been asked to create a fairly involved webstore as a test of my ability
> to learn new types of scripting"
> Having done websites for a long time, I'm convinced that PHP and MySQL are the
> best place to start, hands down.
> Perl is difficult to learn, but useful for -other- things.
> Postgres is difficult to learn, but useful for -other- things.

Well, I disagree.  PostgreSQL is in no way more difficult to learn than
MySQL.  It supports more features, but if one doesn't use them they
don't get in the way.  MySQL SQL statements will run in PostgreSQL and
vice versa for all basic stuff.

> Php was developed for the web.  It is easy to learn, and rocks like nothing else
> for the web.  It works with almost anything, and if the humoungous code base
> available doesn't have what you want, it has the best support newsgroup I've
> ever seen, so you can roll your own.

All true.

> All other arguments have some other non-web related reason for using them.

It is very important to ask if your web application needs to work with
other systems on the backend, so I wouldn't discount "non-web" related
reasons.

> Anything from MS is security challenged.

And expensive!

> Avoid javascript.  Any serious script will crash half the browsers and they'll
> blame your code.  Some browsers will have different capabilities and it will
> work weird, and they'll blame your code.  Some browsers have all client-side
> scripting turned off, so you lose all your functionality, and they'll blame your
> code.  Been there, done that, don't do it anymore.  Do your scripting
> server-side.

Agree.  If you *need* Javascript and other DHTML-ish things there are
client browser sensitivity "modules" for PHP (and other languages I
assume).