[Xitami] Re: Xitami and ASP / Coldfusion compatibility

[Thomas J. Hruska]

At 06:34 PM 7/7/2003 -0700, Ross Dakin writeth:
>I would agree that PHP is your best bet.  It works with Xitami easily, it's
>FREE, and it works with MySQL easily (also free).  You don't use IIS, why
>use ASP  ;-)

Can I disagree here?  I've written a good 10,000+ lines of PHP code in my
day and PHP comes no where near the simplicity of Nuclear
Vision/ColdFusion.  Since the OP is just starting into dynamic programming
(and maybe programming in general!), I suggested Nuclear Vision because it
has superior error messages...when the NVML scripting engine detects an
error, it spits out about 2-5 printed pages of information, with the most
relevant stuff at the top and the least relevant at the bottom.  For a
beginner to dynamic webpage development, this sort of thing makes Nuclear
Vision a superior language as PHP will _MAYBE_ spit out a one-line, cryptic
error message at best and nothing at all at worst.  ColdFusion spits out
errors at a slightly less caliber as Nuclear Vision, but is less organized
(IMO).  Of course, there are other reasons to not use PHP as a "first
programming language," but choosing a language with good error messages at
appropriate locations relieves many headaches.

Also, Nuclear Vision is freeware and integrates just fine with MySQL via
MyODBC.  This is where I have one other disagreement.  MySQL, while useful
for small websites, is not my DBMS of choice.  I prefer taking Access
97/2000 databases and using Access as a prototyping tool.  Then, when I'm
ready to go into production, I'll export my Access database into SQL
queries to use for importing into the production database (e.g. Oracle, IBM
DB2, MySQL).  So, for the OP, I recommend Access as it is easy-to-use
(versus the formerly recommended MySQL setup), but let me warn you that
Access SQL queries via ODBC take about 10-50 times as long to connect to
and execute versus a commercial-level RDBMS.  MySQL has never really
impressed me, despite the fact that I use it, but it is pretty popular and
can handle query loads that Access (Microsoft Jet) cannot.

Oh, BTW, whatever you do, be sure to upgrade your MDAC (Microsoft Data
Access Components) to v2.71 or you will probably experience weird errors
when you try to run SQL queries across ODBC (doesn't matter if you use PHP,
Perl, Nuclear Vision, or ColdFusion):

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/downloads/list/dataaccess
.asp

(URL might be on two lines...)

Hope this helps!


          Thomas J. Hruska -- shinelight@shininglightpro.com
Shining Light Productions -- "Meeting the needs of fellow programmers"
                  http://www.shininglightpro.com/