RE: [PHP] Best external app from php

C.F. Scheidecker Antunes wrote: > Hello all, > > I need to have a web application to call an external app that needs to > execute on the background. (It is an *NIX server) [...] > My question is this: > > Is it better to write the external app in PHP or Java? Assuming that you (or the developer(s) if not you) are just as familiar/comfortable developing in Java as they are PHP, I would think the most important factor would be code reuse. Is there now or will there ever be a need to share business logic between this external application and the web interface itself? If the answer is yes, or it's even possible that the answer MAY be yes, I would highly suggest that you code both the web interface and the external application in the same language, so you can reference any business logic classes/functions created for one in the other. A while back I developed a program that consisted of a traditional web interface and a standalone command line script that gathered data from my database, formatted it, and emailed it to subscribers based on their pre-selected criteria. I used PHP for the web application but at the time I decided that Perl was better suited for the command line script than PHP was. *BIG* mistake. I ended up recoding a lot of already-developed business logic for the command line script. Now maintenance on this program is a nightmare. Anytime anything significant changes in the business logic I have to basically implement the change twice. You may want to keep this in mind, since it will be difficult if not impossible to share logic/code between a PHP web app and an external Java program. > If I write in PHP then I have to have a way to make the PHP not bound > to time limitations as the operation might take a while. That's easily accomplished. You can create a separate php-cli.ini file for the standalone PHP binary and configure different limits for max_execution_time and memory_limit. > Which one would put a higher load to the processor, a PHP app or a > Java one? > Which one will take longer? I'll leave these questions to someone else, as I have almost no Java experience... > Also, there might be more than 20 of these threads running on the > server at the same time, hence my concern on which language the app > should be writen. Since these processes can be launched by the end user at will (from the sound of your description), you may have a lot more than just 20 of them running. It's very difficult to predict how end users will (ab)use your program. Some people like to click refresh a lot, for example. :) Depending on how many people have access to your application, you may want to put a mechanism into place to impose a hard limit on the number of these processes that can be active at any time, or you may open your server up to an increased possibility of DoS attack. Just a thought... HTH