Re: Perl or PHP?

>Probably one of the ancient questons in Internet history: what
 scripting
>language should I use - PHP or Perl? (I'm not mentioning even ASP...)

The idea with PHP is to let the server produce HTML pages on request, out of the content of a database. For this purpose you create template pages with mixed HTML and PHP code (inline code). The HTML is to specify the "layout" whereas the PHP code is to tell the PHP server what information to retrieve from the database, how to retrieve it and where to put it on the page.

When you decide to learn a new language you also decide to invest a lot of time and therefor want the highest payback possible. The PHP scripting language is only available within PHP. Perl, on the other hand, is a language you will be able to use to automate Unix administration, write plain CGI scripts... and use in such PHP-similar platforms as ModPerl and Velocity Engine. They too let you use inline code -- in this case Perl.

And as another writer mention, there is a huge source of useful Perl libraries in CPAN.

Mikael Received on Thu Jul 06 2000 - 00:00:00 CDT