[ALUG] Re: Web/Sql development environments

[Brett Parker]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2006 at 10:03:23AM +0000, Christopher Dawkins wrote:
> 
> >> 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.

And if you're using PHP then you're going to want Smarty - which isn't
as common. That and PHP being by far the worst language I've ever had
the misfortune of writing, and is a complete nightmare to debug, and
has a non-threadsafe design, and forces the choice of apache2 mpm
because of that (if you're planning on running mod_php, that is).

PHP is something that now doesn't go on any machines that I have control
over - there is only *one* machine at work with PHP on it, and that's
because a colleage decided that mediawiki was the wiki engine to use
before I got there.

> > 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.

Yes, lots of PHP developers where caught out by register globals, but as
they shouldn't have been using that in the first place (can we say nasty
horrible security risk, I think we can...) that's not really a problem.
I don't understand what you mean by "django is big", by my reconing it's
a "huge" 12M of framework which means that you can save hours of
development work.

But on to the other "issue", these days it's almost as cheap to get a
virtual server as it is to get webspace (I have 2 virtual servers, and
access to a FreeBSD box where my website is actually hosted - then, at
the moment, my website is static html generated from some xml files and
a small bash script). Also, recommending the use of "javascript" for any
website is a bad move, unless you also advocate that there are
alternative ways to get that information, javascript is something that
should be used sparingly and *always* with a fallback so that the site
keeps working if the browser has javascript turned off.

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

For progress we just need people to stop using amnd recommending PHP -
you did see that one of the lead PHP security guys left last month,
right?

Cheers,
-- 
Brett Parker