I can't (and wouldn't try to) speak for anyone else.. but I'd avoid FP
like the plague. I myself mostly do coding by hand with Vim to do the
majority of my development, though it's not designed to be a development
platform.
I've assisted people in developing web/database enabled sites where
their primary tool was FP and it was frustrating to say the least. FP
tends to put in a lot of fluff that you don't need, and it's pretty
pathetic when trying to do anything more difficult than basic
select/insert/update/delete SQL queries.
Also to consider is, if you develop in ASP.NET, you may lock yourself
out of the multi-platform capability of your app, which will effectively
limit the audience of people able to use it. Naturally MS is going to
tell you ASP.NET is the best way to do it, because once you do, the
amount of work you'd have to do to move it to a different platform would
be astronomical.
If you really want the application to live a long time, your best bet is
to develop it with open and universally accepted standards (I recommend
having it checked against W3C's site for conformance), so that it is not
only cross-browser compatible, but cross-platform compatible as well.
In my personal experience, the majority of sites I develop (unless
there's a specific reason not to make them so) run perfectly well in
either a Windows- or Linux-based operating system environment.
I'm sure there are tons of viable development environments for what
you're looking for, so hop on over to sourceforge and check it out. As
for your web pages, remember they do not need to be 'rich' to be user
friendly. I often find that people get annoyed with the flashiness of
websites because there's often too much. There's absolutely nothing
wrong with richness in your web app, but keep it limited and keep it
simple. That will keep the users happy and wanting to use it. Cheers!
Armando
Tony Aldemir wrote:
Hi There,
I am trying to decide what software to use along with PHP so that I can
create a decent looking/rich WEB enabled and database aware application for
my end-users.
It seems that trying to develop rather sophisticated/user friendly and rich
WEB pages using raw html code intermingled with PHP code would be
practically prohibitive due to its labor intensity. Plus you have to know
all that html jazz to make your pages look rich and professional.
Long story short, I went to Microsoft's WEB site to see if I can use
FrontPage2003 in conjunction with PHP. The answer is "YES", after making
some config. Changes to FrontPage (e.g. disabling ASP.NET capabilities of
FP, etc.). However, Microsoft was also very quick to turn around and
suggest I the same article that ASP.NET may be a much better direction to go
in order to develop database aware WEB site capabilities/apps. That are also
rich and professional looking.
I felt rather disappointed, after thinking that I finally found a very cost
effective way to develop WEB enabled apps. (i.e. PHP + Apache + MySQL), I am
not sure anymore.
I am also concerned about making my WEB app. multi DB capable. That brought
in the ADODB libs., and I am yet to successfully connect to MySQL DB using
ADODB (i.e. adodb.inc.php), but that is another subject to discuss.
The bottom line question I have is this: What is recommended by the PHP
gurus, who have been successfully using PHP for quite a while? What
software tool(s) is suggested to build function rich, database capable,
robust WEB applications that are also intuitive and user friendly due to
their presentation layer being strong and rich (e.g. forms, etc.)?
Sorry for the length of this email, but I believe this is an important
decision to make before I start investing my blood and tears into an
application that hopefully will live relatively long life instead of
becoming obsolete in a couple of years.
Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
Kind Regards,
Tony Aldemir
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