Hey guys, thanks in advance for your help. I have a project in the works and will be looking for a programmer to JV with here soon, but I'm not 100% sure what kind of programming would be best. Basically, I have a site that will allow clients to log into, and in their members area they will get to control some basic stuff such as frequency, topics targeted, and have a dashboard of metrics they can view. The real magic is that they will get to start and stop an automated system (web app, if what i've gathered is correct), that runs entirely in the cloud. From what I've read, I think PHP would be best, but I would rather hear it from some programming experts so I know what to look for when searching for a JV partner. If you need more information to help figure this out, let me know! Thanks, Justin
PHP will do the server stuff just fine, but so will java and asp. Hosting for java and asp may be more difficult to get and more expensive. You need to look at your traffic projections and decide what type of hosting you need. I think the architecture of the system that gets written will be a bigger factor than the scripting language used.
Thank you for the reply! Any chance you could elaborate on what you mean by the architecture of the system?
How the tables are built, how the automated bits are scheduled, how the workflow is handled - that kind of thing. If the table structure is "normalised" it is incredibly flexible but a bit of a nightmare for less skilled people to work with. If it's not then it is easier to work with but harder to make changes to. You need a way to have automated jobs run in batches and have checks for success and options to rerun if there is a problem but then notify the process owner if it's failing - that could be you or it could be your user.
Depending on the type of service and size/amount of traffic, you might also want to consider running node.js
It’s worth mentioning JQuery at this point too. JQuery is a Javascript-framework which lets you write less code and gives you greater browser compatibility, and is quickly becoming the standard for modern webpages. It’s particularly useful for targeting specific parts of a webpage using familiar CSS terms and doing something with them, such as showing or hiding them. Although JQuery is made from Javascript, it introduces its own unique language components too, so just because you know Javascript doesn’t mean you can automatically use JQuery (you could also argue that you don’t need to know much Javascript to be able to use jQuery). We’ll definitely be looking at this one at some point . Small Example:
Ajax (Jquery is a type of ajax) is an important part of the infrastructure but it still relies on some sort of server scripting language.
It's all depends on how the back-end expected to work. Is it contains lots of heavy algorithms running 24*7 and other complexities. If cost is a concern Php is always a better option but if not and who are mostly concerns about performance , maintainability and scalability etc... Java can be a very good option compare to Php.
Php is great. Together with ajax it can give a website really good flow without reloading the webpage all the time. If performance is an important part, try using c++ to create the most performance demanding parts and then integrate the c++ to get called using php.
PHP is a good language for web automation. I've coded a few websites before using this language and I mainly used it for client-server side programming. However, like what others have suggested here, you can also try JQuery, Javascript.
I would like to suggest you PHP is the best programming for the web automation. PHP is server side scripting language. It is widely-used and free. You can also use Ajax and jquery.
PHP + C# would be most suitable for web automation. You can use PHP if you want everything done on server itself and you are doing it yourself. C# is cool when want to automate stuff on your windows and make apps with GUI so that it's easier for you to excute the apps using GUI.
I wouldn't discount Ruby either. Look at watir.com, may be able to help you not sure though (can do some cool stuff). Good luck!