It seems that my last general question of PHP vs. Perl was not too popular for its general nature on topic that has been beat to death. However, I feel like bring adventureous again.

For fun, I decided to do a personal project of mine with php. It seems to me that on the surface php offeres some nice features like DB connectivity and cookie handling that is intuitive to the language. From this stand point doing dynamic pages with a php, mysql, and xml is in fact quicker and cleaner than attempting to do the same with Perl. For the sake of brevity, my reasoning for this was due to the general lack of system administrators help in compiling some modules that I needed such as DB drivers and XML modules. I also found problems compiling the modules on my system and them transferring them over to the where the site was hosted. Last but not least there is the quota issue of having to house my modules on my disk space since the sysadmin would not comply with my requests to have certain obscure modules installed.

From experience it seemed like a smart move to convert my project to php. Now, hypothetically speaking, if I was to host my own site. I think that a mixture of a php front end and mysql back end seems to be easier and cleaner to do from this last projects experience. However, I am guessing that I could benefit from running perl scripts in my crom tab for DB clean up and perhaps some other web applications that do not require a user interface and can be used in the backend. For example, banner tracking, clicks, redirects and the like.

I am not one to contend that PHP is a better language than Perl. For one there is no comparision with the robustness of Perl in comparison with PHP. However, IMHO, for general CGI programming it seems clear to me that PHP seems to be the better choice (at least for front end development).

Is this the consesus that is found amongst CGI developers? If so, why is it the consensus? If not, where can I find information or discussions justifying the stance of the developer on which language is better for CGI development?

Good Hunting,
kha0z

In reply to PHP vs. Perl for the 10,000th time by kha0z

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