Excuse me? Where does it say that you can only use Perl or PHP to do Web based applications? Java, C, C++ and many other languages can be used as well, without any problems.

In the list of available features at my host for starters. ;o)

I've tried using C in the past, and I found it too unforgiving of errors during the learning process - it's too easy to cause the machine to reset. It's bad enough doing that on my own machine, but I'd rapidly become unpopular if I did it on someone else's server.

Having to recompile after every change didn't help the learning process much either.

The closest I've been to Java is JavaScript, so I'd have to start learning the language from scratch.

ASP and ColdFusion are too platform specific, and I have no experience with them whatsoever.

I've already had experience in adapting existing Perl and PHP programs, I have both languages installed on my own machine, and the hosts I use support both.

Perl is also a lot more suited to text processing than any of the alternatives mentioned, and HTML is basically just text.

I'm a bit confused. You find C too unforgiving of errors, yet you want to make Perl less forgiving and more like C. (I don't have a clue what you mean by 'causing the machine to reset').

As for thinking that JavaScript is close to Java, you're wrong. JavaScript has nothing to do with Java, except the name. Netscape developed LiveScript around the time SUN launched Java. As a marketing ploy, just before releasing it to the masses, Netscape renamed LiveScript to JavaScript.

Abigail

By 'unforgiving of errors' I was referring to those times when the pre-processor and compiler don't realise you've done something dumb with a variable and caused a value (or values) to be sent into an area of memory reserved for use by the O/S.

On a PC running Windoze, this generally either gives you the "blue screen of death" (a blue screen with a bunch of hex characters on) or does the same thing as pressing the reset button.

In other words, you have to reboot or the computer does that for itself without asking.

Well, I've used BASIC, C, COBOL, Perl, PHP, a little Z80 assembler and a tiny bit of JavaScript. I've also read articles and books about Pascal and Modula 2, but haven't actually used them.

Out of those, I would assume that JavaScript is the closest to Java, although I've never actually seen Java code.