I have been developing web applications and sites for almost 3 years now. The languages I use are PHP, JS, and HTML, using Aptana. About 1 year ago, I started doing Android dev as well, using the ADT plugin for Eclipse. Soon after, I completely fell in love with the way Android organizes / integrates different file types, and how they interact. For example, you do not you don't just inline Android Java in XML files, and vice versa. Specific Android methods are used to manipulate XML functions in a transparent way, and it is extremely easy to avoid mixing GUI functionality with actual app functionality.
What I'm looking for is something similar for web dev. For example, call a PHP function such as page->getButton('id')->setText('text'); to manipulate HTML, and then edit the actual HTML seperately for specific tweaking if necessary. I generally use jQuery for similar functionality, but this is hardly a solution to my problem as I generally need to inline PHP in HTML anyway. I am aware of some wysiwig editors out there, but the excessive amount of garbage code they generate makes me lose all respect for the idea of using them.
Are there any good plugins / classes out there that do what I'm looking for? I'm getting to the point where I'm considering writing my own Eclipse plugins in my spare time to do what I want.
Related
I'm deciding on a web framework for an upcoming project, and I'd appreciate any advice. We've decided to use jQuery for the JavaScript, and are heavily leaning toward Python or PHP (more Python) for our server-side logic. I'm especially interested in web2py because of its jQuery integration.
About our project
Our project is to develop a security console for a complex
cybersecurity system operating within an organization's internal
network.
This console will be largely server-driven, as messages come in from the network and must be pushed by the server to the user.
The user will also be able to initiate security actions, the implementation for which will likely be in C++.
The interface we've planned will be relatively rich, and I want to leverage jQuery's power as much as possible.
We have some control over the browser environment we'll be running in (e.g., we don't have to worry about clients with JavaScript disabled).
Our site is likely to have only a few, long-lived client connections.
We are looking for software components with permissive licenses, though we're using some copyleft components (I see that web2py is LGPL while Django is BSD, so +1 to Django)
We have about a month to create a functional demo of our system, of which this interface is a small (but visible) part.
About us
We are two developers with about 5 years of programming experience, but little web development experience. I have several years of Python experience and a summers' worth of experience messing around with PHP. My coworker has some Python experience and has never touched PHP.
I used Django once back in 2008, and was frustrated by the file and code structure, which I found highly unintuitive. Perhaps this structure is inherent to the MVC model (I've had similar experiences with Django and CakePHP since), and I just need to bite the bullet and memorize it.
My Question
Given the information above, what are the relative advantages of the various Python/PHP web frameworks for our project? As mentioned above, I'm especially interested in web2py because of its jQuery integration, though Django's dominance is (once again) hard to ignore.
Thank you very much for your time!
Before deciding on a framework, you should first decide if you want to commit to a language you are unfamiliar with.
You said you've both got minimal PHP experience, so you have to weigh up the advantages here; Will the pros for going PHP (if any) out weigh the amount of time the developers will need to spend to retrain?
(Although depending on your background experience, PHP should be very easy to pick up.)
If you frame it like that, PHP would have to have a pretty convincing offering to give you. From what I'm seeing, specifically Django vs web2py, they both seem very close in functionality - which is good, but doesn't provide the "you must use x!" scenario you may be after.
However, If you will be bringing more people in later and feel finding people to work with web2py will be difficult, it may tip it to PHP. You said your self, Django's popularity (and BSD license) is hard to ignore, and it should make it easier to find people for later expansion.
If it were me, in your shoes, I would go with web2py. Assuming the development team will continue to be Python focused for the foreseeable future.
Python vs PHP: Python
With python, you can always write wrappers for C code so you won't have to mess with starting other processes and passing args to them. That might be useful for your security functions.
Web2py will allow you to easily write a webservice for this too, to more easily integrate the C portions with the web-site infrastructure.
If you already prefer python, I would go with that. If you need to bring on web-developers later that are trained in PHP, teach them Python. It won't take long, and I'm sure they'll appreciate it in the long run. Plus, moving from a PHP MVC framework to web2py or even django would make things easier. I've used CodeIgniter for PHP and find that web2py was so much simpler and easy to understand.
Also as for the directory structure, django is not actually true MVC -- it's MTV (model, template, view).
I find web2py's organization a little more straight-forward. But yes, either way it can seem strange at first. I would say YES, you should bite the bullet and use MVC.
In web2py, the "view" is html markup with the ability to write raw python code. The controller extracts data from the model (database), attaches any needed files (css/js etc) and the model of course simply defines the structure of the data and allows you to access it in an OO way.
Lastly, I wouldn't tip my hat in favor of web2py just because of jQuery integration. It does use it, and a some of the built-in framework stuff (like response.flash/session.flash, the LOAD function that loads a page or data from another controller) rely on jQuery, but using it in another framework only means you have to write an include statement (e.g. ).
But, the way it allows/forces you to focus on development is what takes the cake for me.
I've been using Django as part of my work for a couple years now and truly enjoy it when I can make it work. Unfortunately, and maybe it's just me, but I end up spending hours working on configuration every time I start a new server, or try to make it work in a development IDE.
It's relatively simple to start a new project and start coding. But there are all sorts of little catches that keep things from working if you deviate from the norm. Things like if you want your django project to serve from a subdirectory like example.com/django. The information is out there to make it work. But it's hard to find.
I can't tell you if web2py has those same problems or not. I only just learned about it from your question. It does look slick and simple though. I can tell you that after the hassles of getting the applications to serve properly from whatever server configuration I'm using, django is way more fun to program with than plain php. PHP frameworks may differ.
From my understanding the project not usual web application, you must need event driven program, web server in python.
Django won't help you here.You should look into Flask, Flask has inbuilt console too.http://werkzeug.pocoo.org/, you might need to use twisted, gevent,Flask jquery.
I would recommend asking about web2py on its mailing list -- you'll get lots of help and advice there. Regarding the LGPL license, note that it only applies to the framework, not your application -- you can license your application however you like, including closed source/commercial.
It sounds like you'll need some server push functionality, but if you'll really only need a few long-lived connections at a time, you might not need to bother with solutions like Twisted or gevent. If necessary, though, web2py does include this (requires Tornado, and works using WebSockets, though can be adapted to use other methods).
I'm working on a project where there will be a MySQL database containing data that will mostly be displayed on the web using PHP. However, there is a need here for a back-office data entry application (linked to the same MySQL database) that is feature rich and easy to use.
what I'm trying to understand is where we are at with web-based frontends. I find that there are still so many events and features that I can make use of in a Windows Desktop GUI written in something like C#, VB.Net or MS Access. I don't have a lot of experience programming UI for web but it's my impression that it's still more difficult and takes longer to get similar or the same functionality using non-MS web technologies (I dislike ASP.net, sorry) as compared to programming the desktop portion in a traditional desktop application language like C#, VB.Net, or MS Access.
jQuery and jQuery UI are definately making things easier. Also, there's very rich online applications like Google Docs and Zoho but it's my impression that these are programmed by some of the top web UI programmers around, not to mention that it takes longer to write it and intensive testing to make it work in all of your target browsers. It also takes extra time and code to "block" browsers that don't meet the requirements.
What programming language would you recommend?
I know I may not have given enough information here but I'm not sure what I'm missing. If you have questions just leave a comment below so I can edit this post and answer the questions.
I think, the important decisive parameter in your case is:
who is going to use the end?
TRUE: almost anything can be implemented as a web application these days and web applications are the future while desktop applications will become the exception
TRUE: the obvious challenges of the web are still the same
In your case, if the end you're talking about is for internal use and just a few selected persons are going to use it plus you are more fluent in desktop application development... the choice seems obvious to me.
If on the other hand there is a chance that a bigger number of people in many locations with different computer systems are going to use the end, make it for the web.
You say you know VB.NET, well where's the problem... you can write your aspx pages in VB.NET, can't you?
I'd like to be able to run JavaScript and get the results with PHP and is wondering if there is a library for PHP that allows me to parse it out. My first thought was to use node.js, but since node.js has access to sockets, files and things I think I'd prefer to avoid that.
Rationale: I'm doing screen scraping in PHP and have encountered many scenarios where the data is being produced by JavaScript on the frontend, and I would like to avoid writing specialized filtering functions to act on the JavaScript on a per-case basis since that takes a lot of time. The more general case would be to parse the JavaScript directly.
Downvoting: I don't really see what's so controversial about this question, modern web crawlers are known to do it, the only difference is that they tend to not be written in PHP. [1]
[1] http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity/2010/06/25/google-isnt-just-reading-your-links-its-now-running-your-code/
It's an interesting question and the down-voters are being unimaginative about potential use-cases. Page archiving tools, printing scripts, preview images - all valid reasons to want to manipulate a document with the JavaScript included within the page.
I'm not aware of any existing PHP implementations, but you could probably adapt Mozilla's SpiderMonkey as a PHP module, or as a standalone tool to manipulate a DOMDocument and return the result.
I haven't had experience with server-side JavaScript, but some issues that I believe might need to be dealt with:
Host objects like document and window are not part of the ECMAScript specification (these are objects provided by the implementing browser) so you need to make sure that the library provides equivalent host objects.
You might have security issues around executing client side scripts within a server side environment. This is a lot like allowing the user to submit a PHP script to be evaluation, so you need to make sure the security sandbox is tight.
Another (perhaps) safer and easier to implement option might be to use a modified FireFox or WebKit instance that runs as a browser, loading up the target pages and returning the modified source to your application.
From PHP 5.3 you can use V8JS extention from PHP. It's a native library that uses the new Google V8 Javascript engine to execute JS and return the result.
It's good because you can pass vars in PHP arrays and are interpreted very well
NodeJS (or some other derivative of google's v8) might actually be the best way to go here. If you're concerned about the various things nodejs can do (eg. sockets, etc), you can probably "strip it down" by removing modules and/or addons -- I think even the built in stuff is ultimately implemented in such a way that it could be stripped out fairly easily.
An alternate approach might be to simply replace, override, or remove the require function from node.js.
There's also envjs which should make it easier to run js that was designed to run the browser.
OK, go easy on me as it's my first question here. ;)
I am experienced in Web Application development, but I need to design 2 different desktop applications at work. I need advice on what languages to use (I use PHP for Web Applications, I have little other experience), any frameworks that may help me accomplish this easier and any IDEs to use to make my life easier too.
My first application will essentially be an interface to an embedded or remote DB and essentially it needs to do not much more than CRUD. A fulltext search function will be necessary as will sorting of the CRUD table too. I'd like to include the possibility of hiding columns of data too, but this isn't a priority. I currently use MySQL, but am happy to use any other DB, as long as they support importing from Excel. Of course, if it supports an excel spreadsheet as the database, fantastic, but wishful thinking...
I only need to support Windows XP upwards, this won't change. Let me know if I can add anything to help answer this.
My second application is going to be more complicated, I guess. It needs to output the SHA, MD5, CRC-32, CRC-16 signatures for an entire external drive on-screen and/or into a text document of the users choice (new and append). The external drive could be Compact Flash, EEPROM, CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, SD, etc. Whereas I have an idea where to start on the first application, this one is where I need major help as I have no idea which programming language has built-in support for all the algorithms above, or the best way to go about coding it. So any and all advice will be more than welcome.
Edit: OK, so I have come across Titanium and am wondering if this is the best option out there for my 2 projects. The first one I am certain I can achieve, but the second project is going to be pretty difficult I believe, as unlike most hash calculators out there, I do not only need to check individual files for SHA/MD5/CRC-32/CRC-16, but I also need to check Compact Flash through a USB-connected Sandisk CF reader and EEPROMs through a COM or USB connection as well. I essentially need to produce the signature/hash for the entire drive, not the files on it. Any advice on this in particular would be helpful, please let me know if I am going too far off-topic by stackoverflow standards, as I can create a new question with this in.
I'm going to have to say Perl might be a good (though not necessarily the best) option for you, if you aren't one of the PHP developers who are Perl-allergic:
Perl is probably easier for a PHP developer to pick up than some statically typed compiled language that typical desktop apps are written in
Perl has libraries to interface to pretty much ANY database back-end you want, though I'm not 100% sure about using Excel as DB directly (I'm fairly confident something exists in CPAN but can't recommend anything from personal experience).
Perl has Windows GUI development - from an easier (for you) web GUI using local/embedded web server to Tk to Win32 GUI modules (StackOverflow has a couple of questions with very good references on the topic of Perl Windows GUI options).
Perl has a fairly complete set of support for MD5/SHA etc... Again CPAN is your friend.
If the only development experience you have is PHP for web, your options for quick desktop development are seriously limited.
since i don't know of any (sane) way to use PHP for desktop apps, my first thought was to reach for a framework that would let you use JavaScript and a mostly declarative UI. That would save you from most of the pain.
The best one for that would be Qt, which is supposed to let you do almost everything on QML and JavaScript. the unfortunate part is the 'almost'; since anything that escapes that would mean C++ development. The best C++ environment, for sure; but still widely different from Web work (specially PHP web work).
The other option, which I think would be best for you is Adobe AIR. I haven't really checked it; but it lets you write a 'desktop-like' app using only Flash (with or without the Flex framework) or HTML+JavaScript. When i first saw it seemed pretty much complete. For DB work i think it can use an embedded SQLite library; or access any HTTP service (which could be a local DB+PHP app exposing the CRUD methods)
You could try PHP-GTK.
It may not be the fastest, but it does work.
When constructing a website, say a Q&A site or a just a forum site for a community, is just knowing HTML,CSS,PHP, MySQL, and javascript enough to make the site dynamic?
I am saying this because when I talked with my teacher, he said that major sites use many languages combined. And he said that a site shouldn't be designed only in PHP.
So is it possible to create a good website, not e-commerce, with only html,css, and php?
yes. there is no reason you should use more than one language internally. it makes making it all work together much easier in a server environment, where the extra load of IPC over function calls can slow things down considerably.
Ofc! :)
Lots of large/enterprise portals use only HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP & MySQL.
But don't forget that there's always a right tool for the right job... A simple site (even an e-commerce) will run very well on PHP & MySQL.
Short answer: yes, it is possible.
Longer answer...
HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL are already many languages, but I guess he means that most major sites have a heterogeneous back-end. This is probably not out of choice though -- more often it is historical. As people change and new technologies emerge, new pieces are built with different languages and frameworks.
I have built a forum and Q&A sites with HTML+CSS+PHP+MySQL and many other people have done the same, so this set of tools is without a doubt adequate for building something like this. In fact, I would argue that you could build almost anything on the web with that combination.
A more interesting question (that will generate more heated response) is what framework you use on top of that. A CMS like Wordpress of Drupal, or an MVC framework like Zend, CakePHP or CodeIgniter.
Or whether you should be dropping PHP entirely and using something like Django or Ruby on Rails. Knowing more than PHP will definitely help you to be ready for newer approaches.
The dynamism of a website comes from a server side language that can create a HTML output on the fly, that's it. You can add a DB, simple JS or AJAX, but those are merely optionals.
Now, as for your teacher, languages like PHP, Python and ASP are, in the end, the same. It's ridiculous to have the includes files in ASP, the main files in PHP and the configuration files in Python, that makes absolutely no sense. Maybe, hopefully, he was talking about using JS in conjunction with PHP and SQL which is a natural recommendation.
The fact that your teacher is obsessed with another technology doesn't mean that you can't work with PHP only.
As the others said, it is perfectly reasonable and possible.
(I'm personally obsessed with ASP.NET, but still, I won't say that it is the only way to go for everyone. And PHP is just geat for beginners.)
Is he referring to the front-end or back-end?
The front-end of a website - the part that the user sees and interacts with - must be written in HTML.
(It may optionally include CSS and Javascript to enhance it.)
The back-end is what generates the front-end, and also determines the structure and control-flow of the application.
There's absolutely no need to use more than one language for the back-end, and it's often simpler to stick to one language.
However, for the front-end, you have no choice but to use HTML; otherwise it isn't a web application.
The front end must output HTML. These days it should use CSS for formatting. It will likely use Javascript to provide client side capability. Requiring javascript will likely create accessability issues for some users.
PHP is one of several languages used to handle requests. It is in interpreted language requiring the source be placed on the server. This opens up significant security risk if the someone gets access to the server. Several hosting sites have had major problems with PHP based sites over the last few weeks.
Java is run in a compiled form and code is not required to be on the server. This provides a layer of security as it is not simple to modify the code. Java runs in a container, and usually a framework. Developing using the Spring framework in a Tomcat container is an option. The learning curve is higher than with PHP. It also has strong support for accessing remote resources which allows it to integrate with legacy applications.
With any of the languages, there is a risk that developers will use available functionality when they shouldn't. The Java J2EE model is appropropriate for some sites, but was often implemented because it was the fashion, and there are a lot of tutorials on using it.