Design - continued ......

PHP

PHP is the most popular server side scripting language because it is easy to develop applications through its large range of libraries and as a result quick to learn. PHP usage has exploded as an enterprise application development solution-it's not just for home pages and small projects any more. As well as being freeware and platform independent, PHP allows fast integration with MySQL and Apache HTTP Server. PHP creates HTML from the script allowing dynamically created web pages.

Unfortunately, while the language’s feature set is very large, “No built-in PHP functions can post a message to a news group.” Essentially this would mean re-invention of the wheel, a set of functions would need to be written to perform this task, which would prolong development and, more than likely, at least cancel out any advantage a simpler language may introduce.

Java

The Java technology is an object-oriented, platform-independent, multi-threaded, programming environment. Programs written in Java are compiled to a ‘portable intermediate’ form known as byte codes, which are then interpreted by a Java Virtual Machine when the program is executed. This architecture means that typically Java programs are slower than purely compiled languages, such as C or C++, but faster than interpreted languages, such as Perl or PHP. Furthermore, when running Java programs there is also a small startup cost meaning that other interpreted languages may start faster even though they may ultimately process slower.

Another drawback of using Java for this project is that Java does not have a built in API for communication with NNTP servers, although thankfully there is a 3rd party component available for doing this - The [JSCAPE] NNTP component provides an easy to use API for communicating with an NNTP server.

To overcome the problem of startup times when using Java in a CGI environment, “The Apache Jakarta Project” was founded in order to create and maintain a “commercial-quality, open-source, server-side solutions for the Java Platform”. In other words, a persistent Java based web server application which would allow Java Servlets and JavaServer Pages to function as if running as straight forward CGI applications.