[CentOS] which programming language for server-side admin tasks

Mon Jun 15 08:31:35 UTC 2009
Kai Schaetzl <maillists at conactive.com>

Rudi Ahlers wrote on Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:54:00 +0200:

> 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.

It's not slow at all. I have written such an interface 5 or more years ago 
for our needs and it's split in two parts. I first wrote a lot of small 
scripts that do only a specific task and are controlled by command-line 
arguments. This backend was done in Perl, because I felt familiar with it 
for shell tasks at that time. I could have used PHP or Python (if I knew 
that better). Then I wrote the frontend for it in PHP. 

> Ideally I need something which could
> interact with the OS layer directly

In my eyes this is a bad idea. There is no direct interfacing between the 
two. The backend takes the commands from a text file that the frontend 
writes. One could also interface via database. There is no way to smuggle 
any system commands in because system commands are never carried out 
directly.

Instead of writing it all yourself, have you looked at ISPConfig? I have 
switched to ISPConfig (2) for our newer virtual machines last year and 
it's working really well. Although it's not as custom as my own interface 
I decided to go with that for our reseller customers because it's closer 
to what other interfaces look/do/provide and it would have needed a lot of 
extra coding to add this all to my own.

Kai

-- 
Kai Schätzl, Berlin, Germany
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