[GLLUG] General programming question

[Jason Justman]

PHP should work ok for what you are looking for.  It can be pretty quick 
to develop, thanks to the php online documenation 
(http://www.php.net/manual/en/) and the ability to jump to a manual page 
via www.php.net/pg_connect or www.php/(function_name_here).  of course, 
using good development techniques of seperating application from 
supporting libaries goes a long way (i recommend the 'require 
"filename_here.class"' command).

look into using some templating library, such as phplib..  or if you are 
up to it, write your own.  it will definately help in writing your code 
and seperating portions of nasty html..   likewise for database access - 
you can use the db abstraction tools from phplib or some other comination.

naturally, since you asked for which os would work the best - i would 
recommend linux ;).

when you say 'concurrent users', do you mean like running apachebench 
with -c100?  or say 100 users in a 5 minute period?  these two metrics 
are vastly different.  it also depends on the complexity of the 
strucuter of your code and the bottlenecks in the application.  are db 
queries at fault for poor performance?  or is the interepted overhead of 
php slowing you down?  if it's the latter, zend sells a product for 
optimizing and compiling into zend bytecode (if you wish to re-sell this 
to someone else)..

jason

Jason Green wrote:

>I'm looking for a good combination of a front-end interface/programming
>language and a scalable back-end database.  After a bit of research, I'm
>leaning towards PHP on Apache with PostgreSQL.  This will be used to develop
>an accounting system for a niche market with customizable reporting
>abilities and will generate government reports and contracts.  Replication
>is important (hourly backups if a mirroring-type solution is not available).
>
>I've never used PHP (and not much HTML), but have a decent amount of C/C++
>knowledge.  However, my primary skills are in MS Access and VB/VBA.  I
>looked at pgAccess which is a Tcl/Tk app that tries to mimic MS Access.
>It's not very impressive yet, but has a lot of potential.
>
>I like PostgreSQL's transaction support as well as the "better than
>record-level locking" they use.  This application will need to accommodate
>roughly 100 concurrent users.  I really like Access for it's rapid
>application deployment abilities, but I've experienced too much database
>corruption, it's slow for multi-user applications, and won't really scale to
>my needs.  Plus, MS's licensing is getting ridiculous, and I refuse to
>license MS SQL Server when open source alternatives exist.
>
>So, has anyone developed any applications with this kind of usage level?
>What would you recommend for database software, easy to manipulate front
>ends (and intuitive for end users), or other general suggestions?  Any
>specific resources you've found helpful?  Oh yeah, if you have a suggestion
>for database software, which OS works the best for it?  Thanks in advance!
>
>Jason Green
>greenja6@msu.edu
>
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