what program language to choose on simple web application?

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what program language to choose on simple web application?

I need to create a web-application, that will read content from txt files, read user input information to pdf (i will use itext for pdf purposes). I know java a bit, so I thought about GWT, but i read that there problems with input/output. If not GWT, what program language is good for my web application and easy to learn.

Thanks in advance

+1 A:

You could use PHP. It's reasonably easy to pick up and there's a lot of documentation.

You can use http://us4.php.net/manual/en/function.file-get-contents.php to get the contents of your file, and then spit it to a PDF using the built-in PDF functionality, rather than itext, which is Java-specific: http://php.net/manual/en/book.pdf.php

If you're looking for easy deploy and lots of documentation, PHP is your friend.

Jordan 2010-06-17 17:43:26

Is GWT bad for web-application development purposes?

dsplatonov 2010-06-17 18:36:43

Not bad, but the community around it is not as good as PHP, Python, .NET, and others.

Jordan 2010-06-17 18:59:16

I would use python, but that is because it's the language I know best. I would choose a maybe suboptimal language I know over a maybe better language I don't know.

iText is a java library, so one more reason to stay with java, if you already know it.

Fabian 2010-06-17 17:50:26

+2 A:

I would recomment you to use python. It's an order of magnitude easier than php, has a lot of documentation available and a nice and easy to use web framework (Django). You can create a site with database support and an administrator interface within minutes.

For PDF generation you could use the ReportLab Toolkit or pyPdf.

the_void 2010-06-17 18:01:12

Thanks for comment. I wonder why GWT have low value for web application development?

dsplatonov 2010-06-17 18:34:49

I would not recommend Python or Django to someone that's asking this sort of question. I personally love and extensively use both, but there's a lot of server setup since it's not as common, and Django simply doesn't fit this request unless there's much more to the project than a simple file->PDF converter.

Jordan 2010-06-17 19:00:55

You are probably right, `Django` is a little bit more complicated if not storing something in the database. However, using `WSGI` (http://wsgi.org/wsgi/), a simple solution could be cooked with `python`. You could use the `Tornado` web server (http://www.tornadoweb.org/documentation) and have you draft application running in no time.I don't thing you'd want to compare `PHP` with `Python` from the learning curve perspective ;)

the_void 2010-06-17 19:14:14

Can i create my web-application using java servlet technology, because Java language i know a bit? or Php/python will be better anyway?

dsplatonov 2010-06-17 20:43:34

If you are more familiar with Java, sure, go with Java. It has all the bits you need to make it work. And Java servlets are more mature than what python can offer. One of python's strengths was it's zen-like learning curve, but if you know Java then I think you should go with it.

the_void 2010-06-17 20:50:50

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what program language to choose on simple web application?

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