clipka wrote:

> Any sophisticated suggestions what technology to use? CGI? PHP? JSP (I 
> can do some Java coding)? How about those fancy new frameworks like Ruby 
> on Rails and some such?

Personally, I'd probably use Haskell. But then, I'm crazy.

If you use CGI then you can, in principle, use any programming language 
in the world. (Realistically, any programming language that already has 
a decent CGI library. You do *not* want to write this code yourself!)

It also depends on the complexity of what you want to do. If you just 
want to grab some rows from a DB and show them in an HTML table, you can 
probably do that pretty simply with just about _any_ technology. If you 
want something more sophisticated like session management and so on, you 
probably want something with prebuilt libraries to make the job easier.

When I was at uni, we used an Oracle DB which had some kind of plugin 
that allowed you to run an SQL query and then apply XSLT to the 
resultset to generate... well, you can generate HTML or XHTML or plain 
text or just about any text-based format, really. I don't think XSLT is 
Turing-complete, but for certain kinds of set-based transformations, 
it's pretty darn easy.

Other than that, you're looking at Perl, PHP, ASP and so forth. 
Personally I hate Perl, and PHP looks a mess, but I guess it depends on 
what you actually want to do. Certainly if you have a problem getting 
something like PHP to work, a quick Google search will probably give you 
a million web pages explaining how to fix it.

I can't comment on Ruby on Rails or similar. Never tried it.

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