[ale] need your input on a project...

[John Wells]

Guys,

Just landed a rather large project involving converting a VB/Access/Sql
Server app to an open source app.

I'm most likely going the web approach because it makes very good sense in
this case.

However, this is where I'm a bit indecisive.  I've used PHP quite a bit in
the past, and while it's very nice for smaller projects, I think it tends
to get messy as the project grows.  This particular app will have over 70
screens and a lot of background processing, so I'm not convinced PHP is
the way to go.  I also want to go OO, and although PHP has limited OO
capabilities, it begins to feel a little Perl-y after a while
(<flamebait>granted, PHP's OO syntax is much cleaner than
Perl's</flamebait>).

My next thought was: Gee...wish Python web programming was really *There*.
 I looked at web programming in python briefly in the past, and it seems
as if there was either A. cgi scripting,  or B. a number of server
pages-like projects, but cgi is not the way I'd like to go for
efficiency's sake, and the server page projects looked to be a little
beta-ish and not what I need for a project of this magnitude.  Then
there's Zope, which seems mature, but folks have mentioned problems with
threading and the like.

So, finally, my last option is Java/Jsp/Servlets.  I have a lot of
experience in this area, so coding wouldn't be a problem.  However, iirc
Tomcat is not really intended for production, so I'm not sure what sort of
servlet/jsp containers are available (and mature) as open source.

Ultimately, I need something clean and fast, with a fairly good support
community.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for your input.  It will be greatly appreciated.

John



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