huge web design decision - input requested

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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

I've determined that lack of progress in at my job is due mainly to two things :

1) We do biz w\ some of the dumbest, loosest, most retarded, unorganized vendors/distributors on the PLANET. Thus, the info they send us is always suspect at best.

2) Monster Commerce's web hosting/website management interface is perhaps the least effective vendor app in the history of existence.

While (1) can only be affected by my yelling time after time at the CEO till he stops doing biz w\ fuckwits, (2) is something I can more directly influence. Monster needs to get eighty-sixed, which means I need to come up w\ an alternative to their shit. While all the theoretical bullshit & bookkeeping is something I am familiar w\, the best tools for such an endeavour, in terms of usefulness & practicality, is not something w\ which I've kept myself up to date.

So the first query is, what language should this beast be coded in? Painless mySQL interaction would be a bonus.
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Leisher
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Post by Leisher »

With all this incompetence surrounding you have you ever stopped and thought, "Maybe it's me..."?
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TPRJones
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Post by TPRJones »

My suggestion would be php. It's flexible, easy, and fun. 'Course it's the only dynamic web language I know at this point, so I'm not able to compare them fairly. :)
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

Leisher wrote:With all this incompetence surrounding you have you ever stopped and thought, "Maybe it's me..."?
I'm the only hope this project has of getting done in a timely manner.

& it ain't me. If I'd a huge fucking warehouse of shit to move, I'd sure as fuck cheerily send along a CD-ROM w\ all my product info in some nice format w\ complete & accurate info. If I'd designed the worthless vendor app, I'd sure as fuck make it incorporate reasonable database functionality instead of the mutant subset I am given. & if I'd a hosting service to offer, I'd sure as fuck make my databases more useful than a scrotum to a eunuch.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

TPRJones wrote:My suggestion would be php. It's flexible, easy, and fun. 'Course it's the only dynamic web language I know at this point, so I'm not able to compare them fairly. :)

I'm not a fan of something that looks so Perlesque. I'm not a server admin, either, so I'm not entirely sure what dev suite exists for what language.




Edited By Malcolm on 1187632450
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Leisher
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Post by Leisher »

If I may, what vendors are you using?
"Happy slaves are the worst enemies of freedom." - Marie Von Ebner
"It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies..." - Orwell
Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

Leisher wrote:If I may, what vendors are you using?

Assorted crap pet supply distributors/manufacturers I've never heard of. 'Course, I don't've any pets, either. Some are supposed to be "big," though. My former boss initiated contact w\ all of them & left us little in the way of info about them. We probably don't know how to place an order w\ at least half of them. & the info they send us about their products is so fucking confusing & badly organized that it takes an entire day to make sense of two dozen products.




Edited By Malcolm on 1187635676
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
TheCatt
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Post by TheCatt »

If you're using MySQL, php would be a natural partner. I assume this is all on Linux?
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

TheCatt wrote:If you're using MySQL, php would be a natural partner. I assume this is all on Linux?
To the best of my knowledge, yes. I can't imagine our CTO would willingly let a Microsoft product infect his hardware.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
TPRJones
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Post by TPRJones »

Malcolm wrote:I'm not a server admin, either, so I'm not entirely sure what dev suite exists for what language.
dev suites?! Real men code in vi.
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

It got a built-in debugger somewhere I could abuse?

Also need to know how many potentially useful apps are written in my language of choice. Fuck knows all the reasonable Java or Perl that could ever be written probably has. Christ fucking help me if I have to use Java.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
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TPRJones
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Post by TPRJones »

There's plenty of free blog and forum packages out there for php. They're fairly adaptable to build most general website aps. As to your specific needs I don't know, but here are some possibly useful links:

A really basic intro: A simple tutorial
(That's a fairly good website for all info on programming in php, really)

List of PHP editors

List of PHP libraries

Not exactly what you are trying to do, but some of these or these could be a useful starting point to hack something together without starting from scratch. There may be other things out there already suited for what you need, but I don't know the lingo to search for them. But there's a ton of free php stuff out there already (although they'll all be buggy to one degree or another, count on having to hack at them to get them to work properly).
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

I worry about integrating shopping carts & such into this bloody thing. This project is decidedly unpleasant. One thinks there'd be some freeware somewhere for this sort of shit. Perhaps I shall research things tomorrow.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
thibodeaux
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Post by thibodeaux »

Ruby on Rails!
DoctorChaos
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Post by DoctorChaos »

There are a butt load of packages that interact with mySQL. If you're not partial to perlesque languages, python is nice. It give you the flexibility of scripting or OOP, the syntax is pretty intuitive. My only gripe is it's whitespace dependent. If you don't indent just right it shits a brick. Along those lines you could use cherrypy, turbogears,django.

I've used turbogears and cherrypy. Cherrypy is integrated into Turbogears. Turbogears has a bunch of stuff integrated into including a templating engine, a sql interface, etc. I like cherrypy for it's relative simplicity. Haven't used django but heard good things.
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Malcolm
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Post by Malcolm »

thibodeaux wrote:Ruby on Rails!
Somehow, some way, I knew you'd say that.
Diogenes of Sinope: "It is not that I am mad, it is only that my head is different from yours."
Arnold Judas Rimmer, BSC, SSC: "Better dead than smeg."
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