binary application w/ HTML interface

[ovrmyhead]

Hi All,

I'm just taking my first steps into the Linux world...by force. I've been asked to create an HTML interface for simply binary applications like traceroute on a Linux box. I've worked extensively in VB, ASP.Net, and SQL but am not sure which technology is most appropriate for Linux systems.

Is Python, Perl/PHP, or Java the best fit? I just need to know where to begin.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

[techieMoe]

Hi All,

I'm just taking my first steps into the Linux world...by force. I've been asked to create an HTML interface for simply binary applications like traceroute on a Linux box. I've worked extensively in VB, ASP.Net, and SQL but am not sure which technology is most appropriate for Linux systems.

Is Python, Perl/PHP, or Java the best fit? I just need to know where to begin.

Thanks in advance for any guidance.

Java, Python and Perl/PHP are certainly well-supported on Linux. I haven't done a lot of web application development on Linux specifically, but I do write web applications in Java. I can tell you that you have a much better chance getting those technologies to work with Linux than you do with VB or anything .Net.

[vigour]

There is no such thing as the best fit All of the languages you've mentioned are great.. all of them have advantages and disadvantages.
You will not fail if you pick one or the other.

Personally, I started with Perl and had no problems to understand PHP later on.

About the binary application. If you print our:

printf("Content-type: text/html\n\n");

followed by your HTML code. And put that binary into the apache's cgi-bin directory with executable flag on, you will be able to get your HTML output. You just have to google around for a solution, if you'd like to submit POST/GET requests to the binary.

[Cabhan]

So let me get this straight. You want to basically create a form that takes parameters, invokes a program on the server, and returns its output?

This could certainly be done with any of the languages you name. Having said that, I would suggest Perl or PHP, and particularly PHP.

Perl is very easy to do CGI programming with. There is a module (conveniently named "CGI") that opens up all of the functionality that you need. The problem is that your code is going to be littered with print statements and such.

PHP, on the other hand, was rather designed to sit right into the HTML. As a result, when you want to just produce HTML, it is very easy to do, and when you want PHP, you just type "<?php", and you're in PHP mode.

I personally prefer doing this stuff with PHP, but if you had some sort of framework (Catalyst or Ruby on Rails), then I would highly suggest using Perl or Ruby respectively.

It's up to you and what you feel most comfortable in. I think that it would be most challenging in Java out of the options you name, but it's certainly doable in any of them.