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Choice of Language for Large-Scale Web Apps?
anyon wonders: "PHP is the most popular language for the web. eBay uses ISAPI (C), Google uses C/C++ (search), Java (gmail), and Python. Microsoft uses ASP (what else?). For small web site, it really doesn't matter. What's your take on language choice for large-scale web applications? Maybe language choice is irrelevant, only good people (developers) matter? If you can get the same good quality people, then what language you would chose? Considering the following factors: performance, scalability, extendibility, cost of development (man-month), availability of libraries, cost of libraries, development tools? Has there been a comprehensive comparison done?"
Wrong.
AJAX asynchronously calls any server-side technology without needing a page redraw. It could be PERL, ASP, or anything else that can respond to an HTTP Request.
Please read the docs about Ajax before telling me something that has nothing to do with it.
Please follow your own advice.
Java:
front end - Tomcat running JSPs (JSTL or Velocity for templating)
in the middle - Spring and Spring MVC
Closer to database - Hibernate.
Ideally, everything running in same JVM. Add more servers for scalability front-ending them with load balancer with sticky sessions.
No J2EE fluff, easy to find people, good productivity.
As many as possible. Use PHP for the front end, Perl for input parsing, Euphoria for the graphics, JavaScript on the client-side, Moo for the database and Python for the glue to hold things together. Every language has strengths and weaknesses.
Noooooo!
It will just produce a job ad that says:
Required: 3+ years experience in PHP, Perl, JavaScript, Euphoria, Moo, and Python.
Then when they can't find any individual to fit the bill (surprise!), they will lobby Congress for more visa workers so that they can hunt the entire globe for the "best and brightest".
(Hmmmmm. What the hell is "Moo"?)
Table-ized A.I.
You are mixing up the language with the modules. There is a reason why PHP comes without all those additional modules... so you can decide what you want it to do. If you want to add all those modules to PHP and make it do all that, then you have to do it yourself. But the base install does not include them. In fact it no longer includes MySQL support in it and that too must be added as a module.
:)
:)
As far as your opinions on PHP not scaling, tell that to IBM, Avaya, Hewlett Packard, Disney, Sprint and the others who get millions of hits a day using PHP. Seems to me if sites that get millions of hits a day can handle the bandwidth using PHP, that it JUST MIGHT be able to scale.
And as far as worst security history, you again confuse bad programming with the language it is written in. For this analogy, C# and VB still hold that title. Just because the language allows you to make mistakes in your programming, does not mean it is the languages fault when you create a recursive function that loops perpetually.
I suggest trying a course in logic; it makes your programming better and your argumentative rhetoric make more sense.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
Often when someone asks the question "what languages do you know?" or "what languages are the best?" it shows a lack of CS background and experience. The right question is "what programming paradigm would you use?" or "what programming paradigm is better?" (Of course when you come down to a specific problem, then the choice of libraries might determine the language, but the original poster only specified "large web application" as the requirement so talking about a specific language is pointless).
The difference between the two questions underlies the difference between the two types of education most programmers have. Some have gone to 4 year colleges and got a "Computer Science" degree, while some learned a language in their spare time, or went to technical college. The people from the technical college will know just one language and ask others what langues are the best, what languages they use etc. To them learning a new language hard. What a CS degree teaches (or should teach) is different programming paradigms - procedural, functional, object oriented, along with an algorithms and data structures. So if someone knows how to think in terms of objects when they solve the problem they can program in java, c++, python, ruby and other object oriented languages.
I used C++ in college, then I learned Java, now I use primarily Python. All I had to do is learn the syntax and some of the common library functions -- all can be done with a good reference book and/or Google in a couple of weeks.
Or if a problem can be better solved with a functional approach, I would use Prolog or Lisp (you can use Lisp for websites too!).
So, I think the original question should have specified the problem more exact or ask about what paradigm would be better. Rather than give a general requirement ("large web application") but then then ask for a specific language. This is bound to lead to nothing but arguments of why everyone's favorite language is best and that's about it.
You say it's "simply not true" but don't actually give any reasons.
.NET 2003 and Eclipse in daily work. Here are just a few reasons I much, much prefer Eclipse to VS.NET:
Now, I've never used IDEA for a prolonged period of time - I couldn't get into it, and was happy enough with Eclipse not to worry. (The fact that Eclipse is free helps - it would be difficult to persuade my company to pay for loads of licences for IDEA when Eclipse is perfectly all right and free.)
I do, however, use Visual Studio
1) Refactoring. Yes, there are tools available to help - but it's free and bundled into Eclipse.
2) Organise imports. Even with VS 2005 having some limited support, it doesn't help nearly as much as it should.
3) Built-in unit testing tools. Using TDD.NET to fire up NUnit GUI (or any of the other things it can do) is much, much uglier than the built-in support for JUnit in Eclipse.
4) Ant support in Eclipse. Our Java build script is *so* much nicer than the nastiness VS.NET encourages. I'm looking forward to investigating the VS 2005 integration with MSbuild.
5) "Hold down ctrl to make anything a hyperlink" - want to go to where a method, variable, class etc is declared? Just hold down ctrl and click. Navigation was never simpler.
6) Search for all references (etc) - in theory there's "go to definition" in VS.NET 2003, but half the time it doesn't work when you're in a large solution, and I don't believe there's any way of finding all references.
7) The VSS plugin for Eclipse is actually better in my view than the VS.NET support... much easier to understand the configuration, change it on a per project basis etc.
8) Launching Tomcat in a debugger with Eclipse (even without any extra plugins) seems a lot more reliable than trying to make sure that IIS has actually caught up with changes. Why do web projects need IIS to be running even to open in VS.NET? It's crazy.
9) Quick Fix and other source options - get Eclipse to write code for you, fix code for you, extract constants, etc. Fantastic stuff - especially in test-first development, where you can write code which uses the API you *want* to exist, then tell Eclipse to create the shell of that API for you.
10) Compile on save with a really good incremental compiler. This saves huge amounts of time. Oh, and changes really do happen, unlike in VS.NET where if you change an embedded resource, a normal build sometimes picks up the change but sometimes doesn't. (Not to mention VS.NET locking access to files it's built quite often, meaning you can't rebuild them without restarting VS.NET - particularly in terms of XML documentation.)
These are not esoteric features which are hardly ever used - although I could list loads of those too, if you want. These are things I use *every day*. My pair programmer and I are *always* saying how much easier our C# work would be if VS.NET supported the features above. Half of them aren't even in VS 2005 beta 2, as far as I can see - or at least aren't as well implemented. Funnily enough, I can't remember the last time we said something similar the other way round...
So, I've given some of my reasons why I think Eclipse isn't just a step ahead of VS.NET, but leaps and bounds. Now, why do you think VS.NET is better than Eclipse, and do you really not care about the above features?