sk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
I need your help and suggestion in deciding on what language/interface i should use for building an e-commerce site...
Let me explain what i want to achieve
1. I am planning to build an e-com site that will be connecting to various vendors' database and retrive information to display it on the site. i.e. when a person searches for product (say foo) it will find all the products that have the keyword foo in the vendor's DB, get all relevant tables and create a pretty HTML file for display.
2. The user may choose to buy the product. This means I will need a shopping cart feature.
3. I will also manage all information about the user so they can login to the system next time they come to get history of purchases etc.
If this website becomes a reality, it will be a high-volume site i.e. a lot of people will be accessing it on a daily basis...
Knowing all this, what you would recommended using to build the website? Perl/CGI, PHP, ASP? (Assume Mysql as backend)
I am decently familiar with Perl. However never done web/database programming with it. I have always worked with large volumes of data (flat text files). So I am sort of biased towards Perl because I am familiar with the language. I have never done anything in PHP or ASP.
I know it is better to stick with to something we know well. But in this case, I want the site to be scalable and efficient. I don't mind spending even another 6 months learning a totally new language if PHP or ASP will be a better choice...So please advise me on what is really the best choice and ignore my knoweldge in Perl..
Why am I so confused as there are a lot of Perl/CGI websites around?
I have been trying to find out which is better and I found some information that I don't completely understand. Some websites claim that ASP is "inherently multithreaded" and CGI is not i.e. limits the number of concurrent users. (Source: http://www.stylusinc.net/technology/scripts/chapter2.shtml)
Does this mean a CGI based website cannot host more than x-number of users? Assume a decent Linux server (maybe a cluster of a few servers NOT 100s or 1000s for sure) ..I also read elsewhere that Perl's mod_perl solves this issue (?) and so CGI will be a better choice? I also found a website that did some benchmarking on various langs/interfaces and found out CGI to be the fastest... (Source: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html) I guess the CGI was in C++ but does it make a diff?
I have not done any extensive research on PHP but i know it is very popular with MySql...
The information from the websites are very confusing as I don't have any background in web programming...Could the monks help me out with some pros and cons of these langs/interfaces I have listed above?
cheers
SK