Re: How to develop a web database application using gnu tools

[Tim Smith]

In article <mailman.7810.1254363724.2239.gnu-misc-discuss@gnu.org>,
 Alexandre Leite <alexandrecgleite@gmail.com> wrote:

>  Hi everyone,
> 
> I am new in GNU development and I am looking for freedom. I'd like to know
> which tools I would use to develop database web applications to run on any
> web browser; including, compilers, libriries, frameworks, etc. Futhermore,
> I'd like to use GNU/Linux Debian to be my web server.

Apache as web server. Part of Debian.

MySQL or PostgreSQL as database server. Part of Debian.

Compilers: gcc. Part of Debian.

Frameworks: there's a free framework for pretty much every language 
nowadays. Rails for Ruby. Mason for Perl. Seaside for Smalltalk. Google 
Web Toolkit, Yahoo YUI, Cappuccino, and a million others for Javascript 
and variants on Javascript (like Objective-J). Plenty of these are under 
free licenses. Without more detail, I don't think anyone is going to be 
able to get specific. Some questions that come to mind:

* Is the "brains" of the application going to run in the browser, via 
Javascript (either directly, or via something that compiles another 
language down to Javascript--and there are plenty of those), or are the 
smarts on the server side, and the browser is just a pretty interface?

* What kind of persistence do you need on the server? Is a simple 
CGI-type server OK, where each request from a client invokes a new 
instance of the application? Or do you need something that hangs around 
and services multiple requests from the same client, in which case you 
might be looking for something like a J2EE application server.

* What languages do you want to use?

* What are the performance requirements? What resources will be 
available?

The universe of "ways to develop database web applications to run on any 
browser" is incredibly large and diverse, so you need to find the 
particular corner of that universe that you are interested in before 
getting down to the nitty gritty of specific recommendations from people.

-- 
--Tim Smith