From AdminWiki

Not really the scope of the average administrator, but often enough we're faced with writing smaller (or larger) applications for our own use or are forced to fix code botched together by more or less competent developers.

Contents 1 The choice 1.1 Unbiased facts: 2 PHP 2.1 Administration 2.2 Programming 3 Perl 4 Python 5 Ruby 6 Java

The choice

Although PHP might be your first choice when doing "web development" that doesn't mean it's the best one.

Food for thought:

• PHP in contrast to perl
• PHPSucks
• Experiences of using PHP in large websites

Unbiased facts:

• PHPs availability is much better on "foreign" servers.
• PHP is much easier to use than Perl for beginners, because you can just throw HTML in PHP files (or vice versa).
• Perl is much cleaner than PHP.
• Perls webserver integration sucks. Neither CGI, nor mod_perl nor fastcgi give you the ease of use of PHP.

PHP

Administration

• Securing
• Tuning (Zend Optimizer & replacements)

Programming

• Smarty
• PEAR

Perl

• FastCGI vs. mod_perl
• Perl Package Management

Python

Ruby

Java

• Tomcat