Re: Web developing choice

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 11:38:10 -0700, Michael Rothwell <marothwell_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

>After working with OAS PL/SQL module for the past few years to get data
>to the web (what my client wanted). I know there are faster
>developement/execution products to get Oracle to the web. I'm vaguely
>familiar with Cold Fusion and JDeveloper, and have seen posts on PSP.
>What is the most commonly used approach out there right now. I will be
>soon starting a new contract and I have some say over the technology
>used. I'm basically looking for an aproach that has moderate to quick
>development but is robust and fast when executed. I'll give up the
>speed of development to have robustness and speed when deployed.

I presume you mean PHP, not PSP. See:
http://www.php.net/

PHP is the preferred alternative to Microsoft ASP. Whereas ASP basically requires the use of the MS IIS Web Server (yuk), PHP runs beautifully with Apache (either compiled as part of the binary or as a module), so can run on any platform including UNIX and Windows. PHP, compiled with Oracle options, has a specific Oracle function set (OCI8), or most code can be written using a data abstraction library which makes it RDBMS-independent.

If you use the PHP OCI8 function set, you can put your database and web/application server on separate boxes and use Oracle Client/Net8 rather than ODBC for connectivity. More robust, better security. You can still use stored procedures (occasionally I have had too, because PHP can't quite to everything) or write data manipulation functions in PHP itself.

I have used both OAS PL/SQL and PHP. PHP gives you massively more flexibility. Application development is much easier, as you can easily divorce page layout design (natively code in HTML) from data manipulation.

In terms of robustness and speed, Apache-based solutions are hard to beat. PHP4 with the Zend optimizer is very fast.

And it's free.

Geoff M Received on Tue Jul 31 2001 - 18:36:08 CDT