So I have access to a dedicated server and want to finally create my game - it's a browser based game, fairly simple. I know PHP and MySQL fairly well and would want to integrate with them on the front end.
The question is what is a good server-side language to use either as a constant process or with cron to interface with the MySQL database to do calculations?
Ideally my requirements are:
As short a learning curve as
possible.
Easiest access to MySQL as
possible.
As hard to shoot yourself
in the foot as possible.
I'd like to avoid C/C++ if possible for the above 'shoot yourself in the foot' problems. It'd also be nice to have a secondary language to use personally so I may take it beyond this limited scope.
Thanks in advance for any insights!
You could use commandline php with cron. The great advantage of that is that you can reuse libraries that you write for your game and you already know the language. I don't think it's performance is great though.
Besides that there are a ton of languages you might choose, Python and Java are popular.
There are two good options here:
PHP
PHP is a server side language, and if you design the frontend with some robust classes, you can reuse the classes for the command-line daemon. This allows you to have a more standardized application suite, which will be easier to modify in the future. PHP can access MySQL, and since you already know it, the learning curve will be minimal.
Python
Python is an excellent server side language for an application like this. It can talk to any SQL database with a standardized instruction set, called DB API 2.0. This means taht if at any point you want to change from MySQL to PostgresSQL, you simple change:
import my_mysql_library as sql
to:
import my_postgres_library as sql
And your application won't need any other code changes. Python also contains many libraries that might come in handy, and if optimized correctly, will be faster than PHP.
Conclusion
Personally, I would use Python, for the following reasons:
Learning Experience; Programming is always about learning. At any opportunity, use a language or tool you don't already know so that you can learn it.
Language Preference; After programming in both PHP and Python, I can honestly say that there is no situation where I would prefer to use PHP over Python. Not one.
Available Libraries; Python has a very robust community, and a lot of useful libraries and packages (such as NumPy) that make things much easier for you.
With both languages you could have them run intermittently via a cron job, or you could have them run as a Daemon (which is as easy as running the script(s) while piping your output to a black hole, such as /dev/null)
Another great option for your server side scripting is perl. It has a bit of a learning curve at the start but becomes a very fast language to script in.
A great resource is http://perldoc.perl.org/
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 would like to be able to write database driven applications (i.e. standalone apps that are not web based and don't require a browser or Apache server to run)
I have attempted to do this in Codegear C++ Builder in the past but even though my 'background' is in that (C++ OOP with Borland Builder) it is so far removed from doing the same sort of thing with PHP/mysql and other web technologies that I found that I couldn't get very far for a lot of effort getting it to work. It was a while ago now but I was using the built-in database engine that comes with Builder and I just found it frustrating and difficult.
In other words - Is there something out there that will allow me to make use of web based languages to write standalone applications (specifically PHP/Javascript/mysql)
You can stick with PHP if you want. There are QT bindings, GTK bindings, OSX/Cocoa bindings, and you can call Win32 functions. I don't know how stable all of those are, but you can do GUI in PHP as well as the command line stuff.
As for other languages... PHP is very C like. It started as basically a scripting wrapper around C (IIRC), which is why you have functions named after the C standard library (like strstr). C like languages will feel quite familiar.
I would think Python would probably be the closest to PHP. It's a scripting language, syntax is somewhat close, it has a ton of libraries, and is very well supported and commonly used. I'd imagine it would feel pretty familiar. Using indenting instead of brackets for blocks can throw some people, but it fit the way I already indented my code.
Ruby is quite popular, and is also a scripting language. I think it's farther away, syntax wise, than Python, but I've never really used it so I can't promise that. I know it has at least GTK bindings.
Perl has a lot of resources and bindings, but isn't as easy to read as PHP since you have to learn the special variables like #_. It was never really my cup of tea.
You do have the C/C++ stuff, and Java has it's large library. You may want to go that way since you say you've used C++ before. If you're on a Mac (or willing to use GNUStep) you could go with Objective-C/Cocoa. That's getting rather far from PHP syntax though.
All of these languages have database connections. You don't mention what platform you're on.
But for easy to work with, quick to pick up, works all sorts of places, and can definitely do GUIs... Python would be a good choice to look at.
You could always use PHP. It is a decent command-line / programing application. Other than that all I can say is that you knowledge of database access and storage will be helpful but by the end of the day you are going to need to learn a new language.
Most languages have libraries for database access. Just pick one that you like the feel of. It is also a good idea to choose one that is popular (for the community support) and free libraries are always nice. Also look for good documentation and one that is fairly standard.
A nice thing to know is that javascript and php syntax are very similar to many other languages. (Javascript looks almost identical to C and C++). Just read the main language tutorial then the database API tutorial and you should be good to go
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.
My friend and I are planning on building a sort of a forum type of webapp.
We've used the major PHP frameworks but we're really thinking about using Python specifically the Pylons framework for our app. Although we're competent PHP programmers, we're somewhat noobs at Python (We could create practical scripts and such). But the thing is we really want to learn Python but by testing Pylons out it seems to be really difficult with all the numerous imports and all.
What would you suggest? What advice could you give to us? How would you suggest that we learn Pylons?
Decide what you want to put your focus on, being productive or learning a new language:
If you want to learn Pylons and Python, use Pylon and Python.
If you want to deliver a stable forum software, use PHP, because that's what you're competent at.
Note: I should add that this is not meant to imply that you cannot be productive with Python or Pylon in general. All I'm saying is, in your case, you will be more productive with PHP, because you know it.
Don't be scared off by imports in python. They're much more common when coding in python than PHP in general, and this is good because your namespace never gets polluted with stuff you aren't expecting, unless you do from foo import * (so don't do that). I think you'll find that the structure pylons gives you will be invaluable. There are frameworks in PHP as well, but if you want to learn python anyway, I see no reason you shouldn't dive in with Pylons.
I don't know about Pylons but I've been in a similar situation and built a site using Django. I learned enough about Python in an environment that I was familiar with (web apps) that I now go to Python as my first choice.
Many many times have we had this discussion at my job. We use PHP and everyone here would love to switch to python. Even for our new web projects PHP delivers, and since we use it every day that is what we use. Many things in PHP irk me, and I love python, that said Im a big fan of "use the best tool for the job".
Good code is possible in PHP (and horrible horrible code too), so use what is the best tool for you, and for this job. If however this webapp is a hobby and/or not mission-critical software I would fully recommend python if only to learn a new language.
Is it possible to access & control external devices in PHP?
For example, would it be capable of changing the speed of a USB fan or change the direction of a wireless toy car.
I'm trying to go beyond web dev and I'm wondering if the programming language I use is capable of handling my ideas or should I consider changing the environment.
If these would be possible, I'd very much appreciate any pointers to reading materials or suggestions on other languages that might be more suitable.
Thanks!
On Linux it surely is possible by accessing /dev/ files. But it'll be very tedious. I'd recommend you switching to Python, Ruby, Lua or Java.
For example there are bindings for libusb for Python, Ruby, Lua and Java.
You could write an external program, then use PHP's exec (or was it system?) function to interact with the executable or script.
Seems like the most sane way to do it. Another good alternative is to build a program or script that controls an external device that can communicate with a RESTfull type API exposed via HTTP - and then use lib_curl in PHP land to talk back and forth between it. Believe me, building a basic HTTP server in C++ that can be used to be remote controlled with PHP (or JS for that matter) is very simple.
Wait
I think I read the question wrong ;)
If you want to get into really cool stuff, I say that you learn C++. C++ is a great language that not only opens a lot of doors, but also provides a good learning experience. C++ is lots and lots of fun.
In response to comment
In the case with USB its a bit different and more complicated (as USB has an established protocol and such) but serial is as easy as dumping data into a handle.
You should be able to pick up C++ to get to that point fairly soon. Either way it's a great experience.
This would be possible with a extension, but not with pure PHP code. I don't know of any extensions being able to do something like this, but I think it should be possible.
If you find a command line tool that does this, then you can control it using exec(), system(), passthru() or shell_exec() (based on what output the program gives you back)
Just be sure to escapeshellcmd() if you give access to this program from a public website.