What would be the best Programming language for web applications so that code can compile and ship as a package [closed]

Question

I want to create a web application and ship it to the clients as a package which would contain an embedded webserver, an embedded db and the compiled code. I want the s/w to be very fast and use less resources as it is going to serve huge load.

I don't want to use Java. Because the clients would need to install JVM, etc.

PHP, I know that it does not compile. (However, I found this : https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php#readme .....but it doesn't work on windows). Yes it is possible to obfuscate the code but that I don't want.

Python seems to be the best option but I don't know if it is good with ORM and web app development. Also, if the performance is good enough as it is interpreted language.

I just don't have any idea about "Ruby on rails". Does it compile.

Is there a way to develop web-applications in C++. (Again, this would be my last option as it is going to take a lot of time to develop in this lang.)

Answer 1

Sounds like what you actually should make is a virtual appliance. A virtual appliance is a single file, which is a virtualized server OS that has whatever you need contained within it: DB, webserver, your app, etc.

Sounds like you need an appliance of a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySql, PHP) stack with your app all set up on it. Your client gets your virtual appliance and drops it on any virtual host they have, or into the cloud, and they're up and running on the spot. They can even run it on any desktop or server by downloading the (free) VirtualBox, a software virtualization host that runs on windows, mac, linux, and solaris.

This isn't exactly the method you're asking for, but it does meet the requirements you're stating. You'll also find it's more robust, and it's what business is all talking about lately (cloud, virtualization, etc.).

Answer 2

I like how you define your problem and then immediately reject the most common solution Java. This is what Java was designed for.

You can use Zend Gaurd to encode PHP, and if you use Zend Server it will cache the decoded byte code so there is no overhead in encoding it.

Answer 3

To answer your answerable question first: yes, you can develop web apps in C++. No, you don't want to. It doesn't tie in well to web servers and you likely don't have the skill set necessary to write a high performance web server yourself.

See

• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/417816/how-popular-is-c-for-making-websites-web-applications
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1248923/why-isnt-c-used-in-web-developement
• (chase the related links from these two questions)

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I don't want to use Java. Because the clients would need to install JVM, etc.

Every solution involves some installation of something. Php runs within a web server (like apache - that would need to be installed). Python interpreter needs to be installed. Ruby would even more likely need to be installed than python on a linux system. Neither Ruby north Python themselves are able to serve web requests (unless you build a web server in there, but thats poor performance... I'll get to that) which means installing, again, a web server of some sort.

PHP, I know that it does not compile. ... Yes it is possible to obfuscate the code but that I don't want.

Php, python, and ruby are all interpreted languages. Obfuscating the code is a hinderance, but not something that would seriously stop a person who wants to look at how things run under the covers. It isn't really a problem either for someone to disassemble a compiler binary.

I want to create a web application and ship it to the clients as a package which would contain an embedded webserver, an embedded db and the compiled code. I want the s/w to be very fast and use less resources as it is going to serve huge load.

You really need to determine what load you are going to have (that should be part of the client's specs in terms of pages per second). What sounds like a huge load may be laughably small when one actually benchmarks the server. On the other hand, if you are building your own web server, even a small load may be too much.

Trying to come up with some abstract "I want a single deployable that does everything" is a poor requirement that you really need to rethink.