Wil — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 14:57:07 +0000

< ducking well out of this one >

The only advice I'd give is try to stick to the native environments that you are familiar with you and the machine you are operating is familiar with.

I personally use Perl on a Linux box, as Perl is native to Linux and does the job I need doing, fast. I wouldn't use Perl on a Windows box, mind, as I believe other languages are stronger on their native platforms.

Peter J. Boettcher — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 14:00:56 +0000

Well, you'll get passionate debates on both sides of the fence. Which way to go really depends on you and/or your corporate environment.

First off, no, PHP is not radically better than ASP, if anything PHP is going to have to play catch-up to ASP.Net. Where PHP has a huge advantage is it's cost/licensing, it's free. I would avoid using CGI on a Windows box, stick with ASP it's faster a less buggy. If you can't do it with ASP consider using COM+ or ISAPI.

Go with what is most comfortable for you.

doublehelix — Fri, 08 Mar 2002 13:05:25 +0000

NT is frowned upon as a web server because it has a history of serious security problems.

CGI is not a program, it is a set of standards for allowing clients and hosts to exchange data.

PHP and Perl are two entirely different programming languages, with PHP being the easier of the two to learn, however Perl is far more flexible and powerful and worth knowing in the long run.

All of these languages you mention php, perl, asp, and coldfusion -- and a few you forgot -- java, python, oracle plSQL and even javascript (if configured on the host) are just means of executing programs server-side.