[ALUG] Re: Web/Sql development environments

[Christopher Dawkins]

>> Are there any mature and easy to use software development environments
>> for Web/Database programming?

I reckon PHP/MySQL but that may be only because that's as far as I have
gone.


> If you've not touched rails, and you want something nice, I suggest
> django, uses a postgres backend by default, though supports multiple
> others

IMHO the problem with any of these is "lock in", and when they change
their system you have to change with it. All us PHP developers got a nasty
shock a few years ago when the "register globals" policy was changed, and
we (basically) had to declare our variables in order to keep our code
running. Long-term code needs to be able to run on any server under any
configuration, and while this is impossible it's a lot more likely if it
uses common and basic resources. I looked into Django and Dojo, and
they're just - well - "big" (and Dojo seems to need Flash on the client to
preserve state, and Flash has now been de-licensed for all BSD platforms
except the Mac). Most effects can be created using basic
HTML/CSS/Javascript - look, for example, at AHAH instead of Ajax.


Of course, for progress we need bleeding-edge programmers to try out all
these new things.

-- 
Christopher Dawkins
  Garnetts Corner, Braintree Road, Felsted, Dunmow, Essex  CM6 3DS
  cchd at pjcd.org     07816 821659     01371 821076