On Wed, 9 Mar 2005, Lan Barnes wrote:
I am not going to say that you have received any bad advice. However, my input would differ.
concur
1. I wouldn't suggest learning Python (unless you want to) or any other scripting language in the belief that any one of them has some special magic for data base application programming. If you already know a scripting language, use what you know. They all have the same facilities for back ends, and none of them is clearly superior enough to justify an extra learning curve.
concur ++
2. Scripting languages, IMHO, are the way to go over C/C++. I won't even bother to go into why. I love C but would not use it for anything but drivers and low level stuff any more. Life is too short ;-)
Very much so -- I have some worked examples from a LUG presentation I did perhaps two eyars ago, respecting in PHP scripting (which _loves_ MySQL) at:
http://www.colug.net/notes/0208mtg/
3. If you already have significant legacy code in FoxPro/FoxBase, write back. There are ways to get that running on Linux (proprietary stuff and also a home rolled approach I haven't had the time or energy to develop). Don't waste time recreating and debugging a working app just because the language has fallen out of fashion.
And I spent the last 18 months in just that environment, with a legacy FoxPro .dbf environment, doing automatic dumps and reimports every night of the producton crew's daily data, as we brought up the LAMP successor.
There is also a connector to dump from a FoxPro .dbf straight over into MySQL, but we found it easier to work through an intermediate flat text CSV format, so eom cleaver unix pipes could weed out some dirt from teh data on the fly -- backslashes, backticks, tonnes of unneeded whitespace, which we did not have validation login int he old ocde to keep from creeping in.
-- Russ Herrold -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
