These days, one can setup an entire, complex web-based application in a 
short time without writing a single line of code, so it really depends on 
how specific your needs are. In most cases there's no need to reinvent the 
wheel, and popular frameworks and content management systems have 
modules/libraries (commercial or free) that take care of typical situations, 
each system being more or less easily customisable. They'll handle SQL 
queries, the display, theming, users management etc, and for the really 
specific stuff you can develop the required modules/libraries yourself. 
They're mostly OS-independent (and more or less SQL-engine-independent) too. 
On the other hand it may be possible that the application is so peculiar 
that it has to be built from scratch, or that using a framework/CMS is not a 
good idea (performance issues, dependency hell, security). Perhaps you 
should have a look at different frameworks and see what they offer (IIRC 
there's a comparison chart somewhere on Wikipedia).

G.



4bd942cc$1@news.povray.org...
>I might soon be faced with the task of writing a web-based application 
>accessing an SQL database (MySQL probably) - unfortunately that's not 
>really my special area of knowledge. I can hack together a HTML page with 
>forms, even with CSS, and am somewhat familiar with JavaScript, but that's 
>about it (yet).
>
> 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?
>
> Robustness is probably paramount. Database is likely to be MySQL; web 
> server will probably be that ugly Microsoft thing (running on Windows of 
> course), but easy portability to Apache on Linux would be a great benefit. 
> (Then again, the guys might be more than willing to start on Linux right 
> away.)

Post a reply to this message