Posted by NC on 03/02/07 16:34

On Mar 1, 4:14 pm, "deko" <d...@nospam.com> wrote:
>
> my clients can't afford to buy Microsoft products. So I need to develop
> software for Linux users and web applications.

Um, so what exactly do you need to develop? Desktop applications for
Linux
or Web applications?

> In the open source world, what is the programmer's language of choice?

Depends. For desktop applications, C and C++. For Web applications,
PHP,
Perl, Python, and Ruby.

> it looks like the top 3 open source languages are:
>
> 1. Java
> 2. PHP
> 3. Perl
>
> Does this mean Java is the open source language of choice?

There are many implementations of Java for Web development. Some
(JBOSS,
Tomcat) are open-source, others (PowerTier, WebLogic, WebSphere) are
proprietary and expensive.

Another issue with Java is database connectivity. Java is known to
work
very well with Oracle, which, in turn, is known to be expensive.
Java
applications that are developed on a tight budget (meaning, using
Tomcat
and relying on MySQL for data storage), on the other hand, are known
to
have performance issues (something is not working right between
Tomcat
and MySQL JDBC driver, so the application chokes at loads that can be
easily handled by PHP or Python on the same hardware with the same
MySQL).
One story that has been widely publicised in this regard is
Friendster,
which ended up migrating away from Java to PHP with no changes to the
database architecture.

> Are Java apps compiled, or is it an interpreted language?

Neither. Java is compiled into bytecode, which is interpreted by a
Java
Virtual Machine at runtime.

> What about C and C++?

You mean, for Web development? More trouble than it's worth. The
end
result of developing with C/C++ is an executable, and to run your own
executables on the Web, you usually need a dedicated server. And
those
tend to be relatively expensive...

Cheers,
NC

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