what is your top server side language and why

PHP. It's what I know the best and because I'm tied (a job) to it.

 

Slashdot is on perl and it never gets slashdotted Seriously, I like to see that cacheing mechanism they use implemented in PHP.

 

I use PHP up front and perl in the background. This reflects my C roots and a long standing disdain for Java. Comments to the contrary, PHP is as secure as you make it. Unfortunately, not all PHP programmers -- incuding those behind some of the forum and CMS systems available -- appear to believe security is their problem. When coding, I always remember that I am letting strangers into my computer -- and code accordingly.

 

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned PHP's ability to be interspersed with HTML. I think that's one of the most powerful sides of PHP (and yes, ASP has that too). You can do similar things with PERL, but it's not as elegant as with PHP.

Personally, I also like PHP because it's very quick to hack something together. You can build a quick proof of concept and take that forward. It's MySQL integration is quite useful too.

Someone pointed out the inconsistent function naming: Completely agree. I hate it, but at least most of the functions are named similarly. Besides, the more you use a language the more you remember these intricacies.

The other "friendly" feature of PHP is that the server automatically knows what to do with the scripts. With PERL, you have to mess with CHMOD. From my experience, CHMOD is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) issue newbies face.

Just my 2c

 

Of course it's PHP. People, who don't understand it entirely would say that it's full of functions,global variables & so on. That's the base over Object Orientated Languages are developed and I don't consider that there is anything hard to understand in PHP.

 

My "comments to the contrary" are 100% accurate.

http://securephp.damonkohler.com/index.php/Email_Injection

 

Shame on you ;-) A good Lisper wasting time on .Net. Shouldn't you be spending your time actually Doing Things??

 

Yeah I know, .Net isn't as bad as PHP though.

I was actually thinking of making my own webdevelopment framework in Lisp. Or use one that's already available. Let me know if you know a good one A big requirement I have is a clean seperation of templates and code.

 

php for me. have dabbled a little in jsp and asp... but picking up php is natural and easier me since i'm pretty good at c/c++...

 

My problem with php is this:

1 - Hit the file system for every single request(unless catching stuff)
2 - parse php source code
3 - compile to bytecode
4 - execute

This happens so that the hosting vendors can fill their servers with hundreds and hundreds of clients on the same machine; since the code is not loaded in memory they can afford to do this. The problem starts when 5 sites start getting hammered with requests and the machine comes to an halt.
This cycle makes babies cry

On any other "sane" language you'd only have one step: execute. Sure you waste more memory and certainly you won't be able to put hundreds of clients on the same machine. But this should be about quality, not quantity.

Oh and btw, the cool thing about .NET is that you can choose any language you want, including Lisp

 

I actually tend to use whatever is suited to the specific task at hand, since the majority of languages have at least one killer application.

Java Servlets (note: NOT applets) can handle pretty intense loads and using frameworks like struts allows a consistent programming standard and content/presentation seperation.

Ruby has Ruby-On-Rails which is great for rapid development of anything low/medium traffic or intranet based.

PHP is alright for smaller projects, and pretty much anything that uses GD (since PHP has the best GD integration out of languages i've used).

Perl (only mod_perl, CGI perl is pretty slow) is probably one of the fastest languages available when running with Apache, and has a HUGE amount of modules available for it through CPAN (so integration into any web service or API is easy). Perl is a hack language though, and the syntax enforcing is not very strong (it allows a lot of things that shouldn't really be allowed) so most of the time writing maintainable code is a nightmare when you're working with other users.

I could go on all day!

 

PHP - Why? One simple reason. It is easy for my customers who are not programers to pick up and can do basic functions and understand whats going on.

If a customer was to look at PERL they turn right around and go somewhere else.

ASP is my second because it is similar to php, Easy going and has extreme functionality, speed, and efficiency.

 

I am with PHP..... even though I am dot net programmer..

 

Definitly PHP. So far I haven't found anything I've wanted to so that I couldn't do with PHP.

 

Well, theoretically. I've seen a couple of stabs at getting a Common Lisp implementation in .NET. So far, there hasn't been much progress. Considering how slowly ABCL's creeping along, I'm not holding my breath.

There just doesn't seem to be much interest in such a project, and I can see why. Why would lispers care about .NET? Write the low-level junk in C and don't get tied to Windows. And who, using .NET, has any interest in lisp?

At least, that's my understanding of the situation.

 

I have to disagree here.

A good object oriented (or any other) language does have a few functions and variables in the global namespace. Or, at least, a few keywords that form the basic core of the language.

It uses those to build all the important stuff, in other name spaces. That helps you avoid naming collisions. For most PHP apps, that's not an issue. For real-world hefty software development, this is a serious concern.

Maybe I have this opinion because I don't understand PHP entirely. After all, I've only been using it for a couple of years now.

I didn't either, until I read this post. I was pretty sure I had the basic language down in an afternoon, and all that was left was keeping track of all the functions.

Now I learn that I was wrong and didn't understand it in the first place.

 

PHP - most widely used, fast, easy to use

 

I'm a professional java developper (client-side only) but I never use Java for my websites. Because PHP is already there, it works fine for my little websites and is faster to developp with. That said, for a big project, I would certainly choose servlets and probably a Java framework like tapestry.

 

ASP (lonely in here), but using PHP more and more each day...