Rudi Ahlers wrote:
On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Rudi Ahlers wrote:
Hi,
I would like to spend some time learning a new coding language, but specifically for server side admin stuff, i.e. setting up users /
databases
/ FTP accounts / virtual domains on Apache, etc.
I already know PHP, but realize it's not quite suited for this kind of admin, and I suppose I need to look @ PERL / Python / C++ / Ruby? /
others?
Can someone give me some pointers on this?
I basically need to write a control panel, with web access for admins to manage servers, similar to what cPanel / WebMin / Plesk / etc does right now, but something more customized for our needs.
I can't help thinking that you are just about to repeat all the security mistakes those other tools have spent years correcting and that you'd be much better off using one of the existing tools or making minor mods.
Having said that, it's really about time for someone to tackle this in java - perhaps with most of the details in a backend LDAP database.
-- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com _______________________________________________
Hi Les, while I understand where you're coming from, I don't quite agree with you. A programming language doesn't make security mistakes, the coder does :)
I didn't mean the language is going to cause the problem. I meant that coding mistakes are inevitable when you start from scratch and take years to find and fix - a headstart those other frameworks already have.
What I'm looking for, is which programming language will be best, i.e. fastest. My OS of choice would be CentOS, but even then that won't make a difference either.
That's all almost irrelevant. Unless you make horrible coding mistakes, nothing you do within the programming language will take significant time compared to reading/writing the config files and database activity.
I can do most of this in PHP, but I do think PHP is a bit slow for this, being a scripting language, and not a compiled language.
Measure what's really happening.
LDAP can / would but be one component of the whole thing, and I'm not very fond of JAVA, since it's rather slow. Ideally I need something which could interact with the OS layer directly
Java is only slow when you have to start a new JVM. I'd expect this to be run under tomcat or similar web container where the JVM would always be running. Again, measure a few things to get the idea. A tomcat app is easy enough to test - there are a few packaged ones to get the idea. As far as talking to the OS goes, all languages have ways to do that. Perl is probably the closest-to-native for most things - and has modules with embedded C-library access for anything else you might need. But java has built-in remote execution if you want to make this work on more than one machine.