[ale] PHP vs. J2EE

[Stephen Leonard]

Chris Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> writes:

> I'm looking at solving a simple problem with a simple solution.  Problem
> is that I'm not sure of what language to use.  The only benefti of J2EE
> is that I can have back end agents in Java collecting data.  Then the
> web app can communicate with the agents to get that data.  I see PHP as
> a way to insert dynamic code into a static web page that executes when
> the server loads the web page.  Is this the correct view of each.
> 
> I really want an agent collecting data and the web interface collecting
> info from the agent.  the agent will communicate with 100 devices.  I do
> not want the PHP to have to communicate with 100 devices when a user
> hits the refresh button.  What are my options?

Have you looked at XML-RPC?  It's a simple protocol with several
language bindings.  You can setup a small webserver on the agents
and have a master program actively poll them (via XML-RPC) to
gather data to be stored.  I guess the webapp software would
be independent of this process and pull result data from a db.
XML-RPC is probably better for compute bound processes, depending
on what kind of data you want to pass back and forth.

stephen
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