language IDE recommendations
 

Hey Everyone,

First time posting; but I doubt it'll be the last. I've been playing with Fedora5 for a few weeks and now I'm ready to get down to some real work. I'd like to gets some recommendations for a good language/IDE for writing web apps with Apache/MySQL (mostly CRUD business apps). PHP seems too much like old ASP for my taste. During the day I use .Net/VS2005 so that's my benchmark.

Thanks in advance
Paul

Hi pcastanhas!

Welcome to LQ.org. Java EE with Eclipse does a very nice combination to develop Web applications with. I'm still not used to it, but it gets the job done :)

I've read a lot that Java in general and Eclipse in particular is slow, do you find this to be the case?

I'll give it try tonight while the girlfriend is watching Idol

Hmmmm, it depends of your machine I suppose. I personally find Eclipse very fast if you compare to to say, Netbeans. I recommended Java because sounded familiar with .NET. While I've no experience with .NET myself, I hear often how similar to Java it is. And since Eclipse is nothing but a powerful, free IDE, you could make something nice with both tools :)

Out of interest what is it that you don't like about php, or at least what you have seen of it?

I believe in matching tools for the task, and whilst I probably have a fairly small tool set I will use php for web programming, C++ for more desktop stuff and occasionally dabble with Java or another language depending upon what I am doing.

Being a VS developer myself, MS took a step towards Java in it's .NET endeavor.

It's easy to create objects that can be re-used by multiple applications without the need for clipboard inheritance. Code it once, put it in the GAC, and viola, every .NET app (no matter what language, no matter how the gui is served) can use the objects. One can even get legacy code to use it. It's a tool that can be the best tool for a lot of tasks, simple to complex.

Not having tried to integrate a C++ class into a PHP script, I'd imagine it's not so straight forward or seamless.

With what I know about Java and it's enterprise beans and MVC structure, I think this is what MS is moving towards. The only difference there is Java is the only language - and since I don't use it on a regular basis, I might be wrong there.

So far, the closest I've seen (and I haven't completely tried it - just simple servlets and applets) was the NetBeans Java environment. From what I understand, you can create enterprise objects and servlets (runat=server code in Java) that can communicate and share a codebase fairly seemlessly. These end up running on an application server such as JBoss or something similar which is like Apache or IIS for Java.

I believe this is the type of environment IBM and/or Oracle are pitching with their enterprise Linux development packages.

All that said, the tools Linux comes with out of the box are powerfull and can create industrial strength software. It's just not as enhanced with productivity tools or seamlessness yet. And when that day comes, MS will either be in trouble, or be the one selling Linux productivity tools. (Heaven help us)

All this of course is IMHO.

graemef,

It's not that I don't like the PHP lanaguage, it's more a matter of preference. I worked with it for a few weeks and I wasn't crazy about mixing SQL, HTML, and objects.

You're right, the right tool should be matched to the task, but sometimes there's more than one tool. I'm looking for as many different points of view as possible.

Hi,

I understand the horror of mixing that appears in much php code, but it doesn't need to be like that. Most of my code is just php with functions that return strings that contain the data to be displayed, or functions that wrap the data in html tags, and finally somewhere there might be a piece of code that will echo it to the server so that it can send it to the browser. Generally, introductory texts don't teach good style.

However, for me php is the most convenient tool for developing a simple web site.

optimist

Thanks for your detailed description of "GAC", having not looked at VS I was unaware of that feature. Sounds quite nice and you are right hooking a piece of C or C++ code into php is not for the faint hearted. There is an extension to allow the integrating of php with Java but I have not tried it, early reports were of instability, what it is like now I don't know.

Do you use any frameworks/IDE to help you write "cleaner" code or is it just experience? I'd be willing to give it another shot.

There are loads of frameworks out there. That is both a blessing and a curse. I used Agavi for a while and I do like it, but for small projects I just create my own libraries. Unfortunately I've never got around to properly organising them so I tend to do too much cut & paste!