Re: FN-FORUM: What's the best development platform for creating Web 2.0 business applications?

date posted 19th November 2007 20:47

Gary Short wrote:

> On 19 Nov 2007 13:08:13 -0000, Carrie wrote
>> First I wouldn't use a Micro$oft server - unless you paid me.
>
> I'd be interested to know if that was for philosophical or technical reasons
> and if it was for technical reasons, what those reason were.
>

Both really, I guess it would be my early experience with IIS sever,
which was a mess until a while after 2000 (the year)
I did some large projects with MSSQL and VBscript and early (classic) ASP.

This was just after developing some really rather groovy applications in
Perl, on a linux server with MySQL.
With Linux/Perl/MySQL I was in control, with M$ the system always seemed
to be trying to catch me out, I read endless dense and uniformative
help files from M$, with a linux based system things just worked the
way that I would have expected them to, and there weren't any [EMAIL REMOVED] wizards.

Later I did a huge geanealogy database project - which got innundated
very fast indeed - The boss came in one morning and said - "the advert
for the new search site is in this months genealogy magazine" and passed
it to me. I had only finished it the week before - long after they
printed the damn thing, I had wanted a week or so to test it!.

It all coped beautifully, though its quite a few years ago now (2003) so
I can't remember what the "hits" were - but it took a fair hammering
that week.
However it was on a different server to the server that took orders, and
talked to the bank and delt with email etc etc.
And it was only really doing selects anyway - just a lot of them.
One of the advantages of PHP/MySQL is that you can make the queries very
efficient.

Any amount of code overhead IMHO is bad,
and it depends upon what you mean by scaleability,
and of course the nature of your project.
if you just want to go faster/deal with more connections, you can do an
awful lot by making sure that the code executed is as efficient as
possible, and that you deal with your connections to the database server
as efficiently as possible.

So far I have either been asked to write things that are simple and need
to go fast, or are more complicated but are not so time critical.

Only once has a website gone ballistic on me, and it coped fine - much
better than I expected!

I am sure that Ruby and Rails are excellent things, but a bit like Sat
Nav, I find it very irritating to know that I could acheive what I want
to do in only a few lines of PHP, in the same way as when a sat nav
tells you to go in a direction that you are not at all sure of and will
take ages!

As a "nerdy" opinion I am sure you are correct and that lots of
academics would back you up, with very good reasons like reusability,
maintainability, elegance of structure etc.

but in the real world, none of my current clients would ever need that
sort of power,
If they did, I would of course approach the project differently.

The only one that ever did (genealogy) worked purely by using 2 servers
each up to the job.
separating the online shop from the genealogy database, the first had
"slow" transactions and the second the "quick" selects and delt with
user issues through cookies.

It might not have been elegant - but it worked.

I have always believed that there is more than one way to skin a -
insert furry creature of your choice.


Carrie