[UPHPU] Is PHP the right language for my project?

[Tyler Gee]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 7:51 AM, Chris Wood <chriswoodut at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 10:28 AM, thebigdog <bigdog at venticon.com> wrote:
>
>  >
>
> > Chris,
>  >
>  > I usually look at various technologies, hardware requirements and customer
>  > requirements before deciding which language to choose. There are other
>  > requirements as well: development lifecycle, cost, employee skill, employee
>  > retention, training and other items. At that point I start to figure out the
>  > architecture requirements and what needs to be accomplished (ie location of
>  > customers, deployment, hardware) and start spec'ing it all out. Then i turn
>  > my attention to development environments and team mechanics. After that i
>  > will start looking at the language to see which one will accomplish the
>  > design by factoring in skill set, training, hiring, cost and a few other
>  > things. Once the language is determined, the planning phase needs to include
>  > how you are going to develop the software...whether that is fully web or
>  > parts are web based and development decisions.
>  >
>  > But i would agree with Tyler, most languages are sufficient for what you
>  > are trying to do; however, you need to take a lot more into account when
>  > making that decision. You really don't want to do a java app if all your
>  > guys are php guys; you don't want to do a php app if all your guys are ruby;
>  > etc.
>  >
>  > yet there is only one database that you should use - pgsql!!!!
>  >
>
>  I'm in an odd situation where our programmer resources probably don't match
>  what I need done.  I've got a couple of hard core C programmers that work on
>  our hardware product and our parent company has some hard core COBOL
>  programmers.  :) There are two of us that can hold our own in Perl, but web
>  development or much UI development in Perl is not the direction technology
>  and tools are going and we don't have time to work on it.

If you are mostly hardware people and you need to interact with the
hardware as part of your app and if you already know some Perl I would
say stick with Perl. But's that's just because I like it. :)

>
>  The reality is that I'm going to end up hiring somebody to write it or
>  contract it out.  I'm not constrained by what my staff knows or what we have
>  developed in previously.  It's a catch 22...  I can't base my decision on
>  what the skills of the person doing the programming since that person
>  doesn't exist until I decide what language/platform we will program in.
>
>  I have started building out the requirements document independent of the
>  language and doing a lot of the things you talk about (thanks for the list
>  of things to cover).
>
>  Given my lack of constraints and the ability to start from scratch, do you
>  have opinions one way or another?
>
>  Chris
>
>
>
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-- 
~Tyler