[ubuntu-za] Database Problems

[Raoul Snyman]

On Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:36:29 +0200, Ewald Horn <ewaldhorn at gmail.com> wrote:
> I had to laugh : "It is very easy to write a very insecure and badly 
> written program in PHP." I think you can replace the PHP bit with any 
> programming language!

Laugh all you want. With Python or Ruby, you have to think about making it
insecure, with PHP you just have to write code. Also, because of PHP's low
barrier to entry, any duck can jump straight in, and that is why we have
such a lot of bad, insecure PHP code. Why did PHP have register_globals in
the first place? It's such a bad idea!

> The reason I went for PHP is that it's easy to get started with, and for 
> an internal application, security is not the primary concern. PHP or 
> even Ruby would allow for the use of a PostgreSQL database (looks like a 
> requirement) while keeping the learning curve relatively low, especially 
> since web form layout is very forgiving. I'd have loved to suggest C# or 
> Java but we all know the learning curve behind that.

I would say that Python is easier to start with than PHP. Also, Python is
fully object-orientated, as opposed to PHP's broken OOP (been there, done
that). Also, with Python, you don't need a web server or some arb CLI-fu to
run your code.

-- 
Raoul Snyman, B.Tech IT (Software Engineering)
Saturn Laboratories
e: raoul.snyman at saturnlaboratories.co.za
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   http://raoulsnyman.co.za/