I have been trying to work on the registration screen for Glancer today. Learnt a lot of things about web service integration, datasets, iteration and form submission. Haven’t been able to find a clean way to send the form data back to the server using a web service and processing the db insert there. The main problem is because of the checkboxes that allow the user to select areas of interest. All the form fields can be passed to the backend – but if I passed them to a web service, it would be long list of 80 arguments! Passing DataSet did not work – I must be missing something there.
And then I thought… It would be so easy if this was PHP. I could just process all the POST variables, check for the naming convention and insert values in the DB accordingly. Now I am “originally” a PHP guy. We chose Mono for Glancer because we had people who could do C#. I can hack C# code, but am at my best with PHP. So do we switch?
Another thing that fuelled this was Qcodo – a PHP development framework. I generally avoid using frameworks other than our internal code library, but this one looked interesting. Mike has also written a nice article about Code Generation vs. Meta Programming (aka Ruby on Rails, Hibernate, upcoming Zend PHP Framework etc). I also liked the demos they have put up. And especially that this is not a bloated framework.
I am confused right now! PHP or Mono! If I select PHP, it means more work for me! I have enough things to learn in Laszlo already, and we are very late in development! The manager mind says changing technology at this stage is very risky! But the programmer mind says PHP would be easier! And it’s also so easy to create Web services in PHP!
I guess I need to sleep over this! Hopefully the morning will clear the picture!