|
|
| GeoCommunity Mailing List |
| |
| Mailing List Archives |
| Subject: | RE: GISList: Automatic data recording |
| Date: |
06/30/2003 06:25:00 PM |
| From: |
Dimitri Rotow |
|
|
> W.r.t option #4 (internet-based data collection), a "more
> elegant" alternative to ASP is PHP (or, Hypertext PreProcessor).
>
> It is "more intuitive" and now supports COM-based design. You can
^^^^ yes, finally, a seeming eternity after
common-sense, mainstream applications have.
> also make it connect with MSSQL. It is open-source, so you also
> get excellent community support.
>
That depends on what you mean by "excellent". Yes, it is nice to have
fellow travellers when one is cast into the role of supporting oneself, but
no, it is not excellent to be put in that position by failing to take
advantage of the benefits of mainstream (that is, Microsoft) computing, nor
is it wise to choose a technology that requires hand-coding when you could
otherwise avoid programming or make small edits to automatically written
programs.
Consider that with .asp you have the community support of users and vendors
of Microsoft applications, by far the largest "community" in computing,
hundreds of millions of people and an immense range of choices of every
application conceivable. In the Windows world, those applications that are
used with HTTP servers usually support .asp first and then everything else
either not at all or rather thinly.
For example, Manifold IMS will automatically write .asp scripts for you to
create a dynamically map-enabled web site and has dedicated technical
support available for .asp applications. Yes, it is true Manifold also will
work within any HTTP server that can instantiate and utilize an object, so
it can be used from .php pages. But you then have to write your own .php
pages. There are indeed people using Manifold IMS with .php who are writing
their own code, but the examples and automated programming and support are
all .asp since that is where the vast majority of users are. You have to ask
yourself if the merits of using .php are worth giving up the wide support
and automated programming one can have with .asp. You may decide one way
but my experience leads me to believe that for most people .asp is
preferable.
IIS with .asp is a perfectly good, very robust HTTP serving environment and
it is very smoothly integrated with Windows and a vast number of Windows
applications. If you use .asp you can set up an Internet map server site at
near-zero cost with zero programming. Not bad! No doubt there are things
that can be done with PHP5 that are less easy to do with IIS and .asp, but
it seems to me the time and effort spent to thumb one's nose at the
mainstream would be far more efficiently spent learning how to use
mainstream resources to do what one needs. I agree it is always possible to
contrive some "must have" website requirement that "forces" you to use PHP5
but that does not strike me as common sense, at least not for most people.
Yes, there are plenty of experts (no doubt at least 0.5% of computing
humanity) who can effortlessly "rig-up" whatever they need to do with .php
and who may even be able to operate with .php in a way that for them is
marginally more efficient or more emotionally gratifying (since the "more
elegant" talk is at core an emotional thing) way than with .asp. For
everyone else, there is a highly inconvenient level of disconnect from the
vast resources available to expedite .asp based solutions and a grossly
higher total cost of ownership.
...
> The latest windows installer is available at
> <http://www.php.net>. Try also getting a free code-editor to go
> with PHP (ex. Crimson Editor). You can then easily rig-up some
> quick but basic protection and validation to get the right input
> from your internet-based forms.
>
> Harsh
>
> caveat:
> PHP works best when run as a module with Apache and MySQL, which
> is only a small-scale database. And .NET is likely to have
> improvements for ASP, just like PHP5.
>
A fair caveat, although I personally don't think of MySQL as a "small-scale
database." It is actually rather impressive.
> Visit <http://slashdot.org> to see a good application. We are
The Slashdot site is a fine example for that microscopic fraction of
techology elitists who are real code warriors and who would rather write
their own code in all things. So what? The message is just not all that
relevant for the 99.5% of people who have important things they need to put
on a website and who don't want to spend their lives coding to reinvent the
wheel. Most people's time is sufficiently valuable so that spending a
couple of hundred bucks is a better deal than spending a couple of hundred
hours (or, even a dozen hours) coding.
> also thinking about using it in our planning work to issue online
> yardsale permits, etc.
>
That will be fun for you, but I wonder how your taxpa
|
|
Sponsored by:
For information
regarding
advertising rates
Click Here!
|
