Rudi Ahlers wrote: > On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 8:31 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at 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 at 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. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com