Best Server Side

[evergrean]

It is very interesting to see what are the most popular server side languages used for developing web sites. Performance, knowledge, requirements, cost, stability and reliability drive the popularity of server sides. The most popular server side selection on WebDeveloper.com is PHP based on threads and posts. Popularity doesnt always mean the best.

Personally I select J2EE and .Net over PHP. For large apps and/or work with web services they have better performance, frameworks and oop compared to the PHP and other scripting languages. Ruby and Python also belong in the mix. ColdFusion is tops among the scripting languages and is easy to learn like PHP. PHP is not on the best list but does have its good points and is great for beginners. I like CakePHP but it doesnt compare to J2EE MVC frameworks.

Java is king of the world for web development and I nominate J2EE as the best server side.

[opifex]

Different strokes for different folks and of course the majority of the time the server side language is dictated by the server. PHP, Perl and Python are more portable and a LAMP server is generally more reliable and less expensive than a Window$ or Java Server (not all LAMP servers have Tomcat, JBoss and Mono installed).

[NogDog]

It all depends on your criteria and how you prioritize them. You state that, "For large apps and/or work with web services they have better performance..." But, not every web site is a "large app" (for some arbitrary value of "large"), nor does every web app make use of web services. Other criteria may be portability concerns, price, what your staff (you) already know how to use, what legacy code needs to be used, etc., etc., and so forth.

So to my mind the "best" server side language is: "it depends."

[svidgen]

Java is king of the world for web development and I nominate J2EE as the best server side.

I'm also curious as to what your performance indicators are--how you go about benchmarking difference server configurations.

Some things to consider:

• Java must be bytecode-compiled to run. This theoretically offers an efficiency advantage over most language, while hindering ease of development.
• PHP, Perl, and may other server-side languages are scripted; however, there are multiples packages and techniques to cache the compiled images. Installing APC for PHP, for example, can significantly increase the performance of a complex PHP application.
• Performance is highly, if not primarily, dependent on the programmer, his/her knowledge of the language of choice, his/her knowledge of algorithms and data structures, and his/her willingless to apply that knowledge to optimize their code in general and for the target language.
• The best-performing version of an app will almost always be a stand-alone hardware-specific multi-threaded compiled daemon. However, this option, while best performing, is the most difficult to develop from scratch.

When you're running the numerous benchmarks, which I'm confident you've take the time to run before making grandiose claims, please ensure that you've taken all these things into considering. Make sure you've created the test application in optimal Java, PHP, Perl, C, C++ and assembly. And please ensure that each optimal solution is tested with and without various byte-code caching solutions, where applicable.

I'm pretty confident that the optimal C solution will take the performance prize.

So, if I had to nominate a best for performance, it would have to be a combination of C/C++ and assembly. If I had to nominate a best for ease of development, it would be PHP. And if I had to nominate a best for ideal balance between performance and ease of development, it would again be PHP.

So, when would I use Java? Well, I probably wouldn't use it server-side for web applications, in general. I might use it if I were charged with the task of writing a highly portable daemon. Java might be a good choice in that case ... But, I might be just as inclined to use Perl or PHP in that case too. It would depend on what the daemon had to do ...

[Mr Initial Man]

Originally Posted by evergrean

Personally I select J2EE and .Net over PHP.

I've used .NET. I find it abhorrent. Perhaps it's because of a poor professor, perhaps it's because I couldn't figure out how to get my image borders to behave.

I'll stick with PHP, unless I figure out how to use COBOL as a server-side language, then I'll use THAT. Just to be an [CENSORED]

[svidgen]

unless I figure out how to use COBOL as a server-side language

I believe you can use just about any language you want server-side, as long as you can make it executable (or interpretable by an executable) in some fashion. You just need to use it like a CGI, I believe ... Could be wrong.

[opifex]

Originally Posted by Mr Initial Man

I'll stick with PHP, unless I figure out how to use COBOL as a server-side language, then I'll use THAT. Just to be an [CENSORED]

You CAN run COBOL recompiled to .NET or via the JAVA Eclipse Framework and there are existing solutions to run COBOL on Apache via PHP (not production stable).
COBOL is not dead by any means. Hell, it's a year younger than I am! I started using COBOL in 1973 (yep, just a kid)... we kind of matured together.
My many thanks to Grace Hopper, the Mother of COBOL and the inventor of the term "bug" as applied to computers.

[Mr Initial Man]

Well, seriously, all you need is for it to spit out some text for it to be a server-side program to be useable as a server-side language -- anything from PHP to COBOL to INTERCAL if you feel like driving yourself crazy.

[opifex]

"Crazy?"
Insanity is in the mind of the beholder.... I've played this game since the beginning. Nothing is impossible... difficult... maybe, but NOT impossible. The majority of my life has dealt with the "digital world" and I m thoroughly convinced that NOTHING is impossible.
Even the folk that complain that their html pages won't render "the way they want them to" can solve that problem by writing their own DTD.... "never say never."
I've played this game too long... and I am never surprised by innovation, I welcome it.

[Mr Initial Man]

When I said driving yourself crazy, I meant using INTERCAL as a server-side language. Have a read.

EDIT: If it still makes sense, Read some more.

[Charles]

But Java is compiled and then interpreted--byte code is not machine code. Perl, compiled to machine code as it's interpreted. Perl often runs much faster than Java. And Java is yucky, you can't beat the simple elegance of Perl. But somehow I seem to always end up using PHP.

[svidgen]

Perl, compiled to machine code as it's interpreted.

In a sense, that's true of all programming languages. Every line (or token) of JavaScript, Java, Ruby, PHP, etc. must eventually be translated in some respect to machine code before the indicated action/instruction is performed.

In the case of Perl (at least for Perl 5-ish), the "compiled image" is still just an interpreter and a dataset. Perl does not inherently convert your code into a stand-alone machine code image. The Perl code just gets converted into a somewhat optimized instruction tree that a Perl bytecode interpreter (optionally embedded into an "image") then interprets. (See Programming Perl 3rd ed. Chapter 18: "Compiling").

Perl often runs much faster than Java. And Java is yucky, you can't beat the simple elegance of Perl.

Unless things have changed drastically in the world of Perl since they've released my version of Programming Perl, Perl and Java both generate and execute bytecodes (aka opcodes). The difference is that Java apps must be precompiled into these bytecodes. While this may seem like a annoying step to some, it allows Java to avoid the overhead of optimization and compilation with every execution. Perl (mod_perl aside) runs optimization and bytecode generation with every execution of a script.

Java has been praised on numerous occasion for approaching machine-code-like speeds. As long ago as 6 years ago, geek-folk were recreating CPU and GPU-intensive games with Java. Oddly enough, the Java versions, in some cases, outperformed the compiled versions. Additionally, several years ago, I read about Java benchmarking nearly as well as equivalent machine code.

I can't say I've ever heard such praise of Perl. Moreso, the praises I hear for Perl are that its regular expression engine is exceptional for large chunks of text, that it's quick'n'easy to bang out simple command-line solutions [in Perl], and that the community (CPAN) is wonderful.

But somehow I seem to always end up using PHP.

Me too.

PHP has roughly the same processing pipeline as Perl (I think)--but it's prettier, it runs in a more sensible way as an Apache extension than mod_perl does, and it's really easy to turn on auto-opcode caching (installing something like APC is pretty easy). Oh, and it's a really simple language with an overload of built-in functions and easily installable additional functions for just about anything you'll ever need. So, you can spend less time writing the code and more time perfecting the algorithm, adhering to specs, making things look pretty, and so on.

[Mr Initial Man]

To be honest, there are languages that I do not believe could be used as server-side languages, though.

[svidgen]

Originally Posted by Mr Initial Man

To be honest, there are languages that I do not believe could be used as server-side languages, though.

I challenge you to challenge us with one!

[Mr Initial Man]

Originally Posted by svidgen

I challenge you to challenge us with one!

With pleasure. Ladies and Gentlement, I show you the scripting language DragonSpeak.