Say you had to develop a web-based application that needs to be able to read the contents of a .NET DLL, and from that, populate the local database with a list of all the namespaces, classes, etc.
It has to also do the same thing with Java JAR files.
Are there limitations on what language I could use to develop this?
I'm leaning toward .NET, but I might consider another language/framework if it's more suitable. I'm basic-to-intermediate-level with PHP.
I would wonder if you would want that? I mean, firstly people write a lot of code that isn't really that good looking and second, some can run obfuscation on there code, what says that you could "get the content" and understand that then?
But sure, there are tools out there that can read dll's and get the content you want for sure.
Rethought answer: It would be better to do it in a .NET language. Reading a DLL will be the hard part. A JAR file is just a ZIP file, and is easy to inspect with tools written in any language.
I think that the "get this information from a DLL" and "get this information from a JAR file" activities would have nothing in common with each other, or with the web application to display the information. Surely there already exist tools to dump this information.
You probably ought to write the Web part of this in whatever language you're comfortable in, and execute a pre-existiong tool to do the extraction task...