Comments on: Choosing a Development Stack for Installable Web Applications: Part II

By: fas

fas — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 06:04:59 +0000

This must be a difference in experiences, then, because, in my experience, it is far easier to debut issues in java than php.

Yes, it works fine in *nix environments.

By: Dennis Gurock

Dennis Gurock — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 17:10:07 +0000

@Jamie: we have been using CodeIgniter for other projects in the past (DelphiFeeds.com actually) and already know it well, so we decided to go with it when we selected the PHP platform. The main advantage of CI is that it’s very lightweight, something that isn’t necessarily true for most other frameworks.

@Tim: I’m sure mono works well in many situations. But because we were looking for ease of deployment and especially compatibility with many environments, I’m not sure mono would have been a good choice for us (e.g., mono isn’t supported by many hosting companies, which would put us at a serious disadvantage with customers who already use standard hosting offerings). Another thing that would scare me a bit are subtle differences in the Microsoft and mono implementations of the BCL and CLR. I’m not sure how justified this concern is though.

@Yogi: The PRADO PHP framework looks interesting. From a quick look, it looks like a mix of ASP.NET web forms and ideas from the Delphi VCL. However, I don’t think event-driven development is the right way to go for web applications. The MVC approach makes much more sense IMHO, so I would really recommend taking a look at an MVC framework, even if it might be bit harder to learn at first.

By: Yogi Yang

Yogi Yang — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:32:45 +0000

I would recommend PRADO instead of CodeIngiter. It really helps in separating UI from actual code in PHP and it performs really very well.

I am yet learning PRADO but from what little I know about it I really like it and would use it for all my future development as it gives me Event base programming feature to which I am used to being basically a VB & Delphi developer.

By: Tim Anderson

Tim Anderson — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 17:06:20 +0000

Nothing wrong with PHP; but I think you dismissed mono too readily. I’ve been using it for ASP.NET and been impressed.

Tim

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 09:05:18 +0000

Interesting article, thank-you for sharing. I would have made the same choice, most people with a shred of interest in web applications have deployed a PHP Web Application at some point and will be confident in doing it again.

Java is probably most comparable in terms of heterogeneous environment deployment capabilities but for me personally, having to set-up and support a Tomcat/JBoss server would put me off.

Frameworks tend to be entirely a matter of preference but what did you think of the Zend Framework? Too heavy/complicated for your purposes?

By: Dennis Gurock

Dennis Gurock — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:40:55 +0000

I agree that this is a nice way to deploy Java applications, especially because a large part of our customers will most likely not have any experience with Java application servers. I still see two problems with this though:

1. If there are any kind of problems with such an installation, it’s not very easy to debug in my experience (e.g., it’s not very transparent what’s causing the problems). Customers would rightly demand that we support them with this and I’m not sure if we are prepared to provide support for this.

2. I’m sure this approach is working very well with Windows, but does it work well with all the different Unix/Linux environments? In my experience, all the dependencies are hard to satisfy (specific library versions etc) in an Linux environment if the software/packages don’t come with the distribution itself.

By: fas

fas — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 23:16:41 +0000

I am pleased your are happy with your choice, but you have ignored the strongest part of java deployment — the ability to ship the container with your application, and give your customer a simple double-clicky application. Yes, if your customer is familiar with java infrastructure, you can give them a war file, allowing them to integrate your app with their systems in the way they see fit. If they do not, however, you can always embed something like jetty in your application, giving them what appears to be a single application to launch — simpler for a customer even than even php. It even gives you a nice value-add you can charge for, if that is your model.