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Dear Monks,

I need your help and suggestion in deciding on what language/interface i should use for building an e-commerce site...

Let me explain what i want to achieve

1. I am planning to build an e-com site that will be connecting to various vendors' database and retrive information to display it on the site. i.e. when a person searches for product (say foo) it will find all the products that have the keyword foo in the vendor's DB, get all relevant tables and create a pretty HTML file for display.

2. The user may choose to buy the product. This means I will need a shopping cart feature.

3. I will also manage all information about the user so they can login to the system next time they come to get history of purchases etc.

From above you can see the site will require Database access, cookies, authentication, shopping cart etc.

If this website becomes a reality, it will be a high-volume site i.e. a lot of people will be accessing it on a daily basis...

Knowing all this, what you would recommended using to build the website? Perl/CGI, PHP, ASP? (Assume Mysql as backend)

I am decently familiar with Perl. However never done web/database programming with it. I have always worked with large volumes of data (flat text files). So I am sort of biased towards Perl because I am familiar with the language. I have never done anything in PHP or ASP.

I know it is better to stick with to something we know well. But in this case, I want the site to be scalable and efficient. I don't mind spending even another 6 months learning a totally new language if PHP or ASP will be a better choice...So please advise me on what is really the best choice and ignore my knoweldge in Perl..

Why am I so confused as there are a lot of Perl/CGI websites around?

I have been trying to find out which is better and I found some information that I don't completely understand. Some websites claim that ASP is "inherently multithreaded" and CGI is not i.e. limits the number of concurrent users. (Source: http://www.stylusinc.net/technology/scripts/chapter2.shtml)

Does this mean a CGI based website cannot host more than x-number of users? Assume a decent Linux server (maybe a cluster of a few servers NOT 100s or 1000s for sure) ..I also read elsewhere that Perl's mod_perl solves this issue (?) and so CGI will be a better choice? I also found a website that did some benchmarking on various langs/interfaces and found out CGI to be the fastest... (Source: http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/benchmarks.html) I guess the CGI was in C++ but does it make a diff?

I have not done any extensive research on PHP but i know it is very popular with MySql...

The information from the websites are very confusing as I don't have any background in web programming...Could the monks help me out with some pros and cons of these langs/interfaces I have listed above?

Thanks a lot for reading such a long post (especially when it does not contain even one code tag;))

cheers

In reply to Perl/CGI Vs PHP Vs ASP by sk

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