“As a business case for this eValuation, eWEEK Labs modeled its
testing on the needs of a new, relatively small Web application
designed for deployment on an intranet. We limited ourselves to a
budget of a few thousand dollars and one week of a developer’s
time. For the tests, we used two identical Dell Computer Corp.
OptiPlex GX1p systems, each with a single 550MHz Pentium III CPU
and 384MB of RAM.”
“With our priorities of speedy development, ease of use, and
a complete and powerful API, ColdFusion really stood out. We also
recommend the use of JSP (JavaServer Pages), which is represented
here by Tomcat, as a good choice for enterprises. ASP and PHP did
the job, but they weren’t our first picks.”
“Sun Microsystems Inc., in an effort to popularize its JSP
scripting language, has donated code for a JSP and Java Servlet
engine to the Apache Group, which the group has released as an
Apache product called Tomcat. … For enterprise development, we
believe that JSP, despite its newness, is the right option because
of its use of Java and the many application server product options
that support JSP.”
“PHP is a real mix of influences, including Perl, C, Java and
even some ASP, and supports untyped variables to make development
easier. PHP is very extensible, and because the source code is
available, a variety of extension modules… This abundance of
extensions also leads to a lack of consistency in the APIs. … A
key concern for us is PHP’s lack of a standardized database API: To
access the Oracle database we were using, we had to code directly
to the Oracle8 API, making our pages very nonportable and upping
development costs. There are some ongoing projects in this
area…”