[ic] PHP/IML

John Beima interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Sat Jun 22 00:51:01 2002


Actually yes many thoughts of this...

First IML is WAY more powerful and flexable that php... Period... When you can
embed purl Perl code right into your HTML pages you can do anything.

Additionally if you program your IML CORRECTLY when you need to go from gdbm to
MySQL to Oracle, it is as simple as changing one entry in a config file, and wa
la you are upgraded...

As to the back ends...

My simple answer to you is... Why are you even using the UI? I find in 9 out of
10 cases it is totally useless... The permissions don't always work correctly...
Sometimes it drops in and out of SSL mode.... Entering products totaly bites...

You took the time to write your back end or user tools in php, why are you not
doing the same...

Is any serious meaning 10+ Interchanger sites per company clients we have, we
have tossed out the UI and wrote our own.

Oh and buy the way the shipping you described is VERY easy to do. Half of it
would even be done with the UI itself. You may need to learn the shipping
section a little better... (-: No attack ment...

By the way PHP doesn't trump Perl for web programming either.

IML code is 100% portable between platforms. You only need Interchange installed
to use it. Not like having to compile PHP into Apache with SSL and all... Which
totally bites.

Not to mention PHP 4 session management totally bites! Sessions cross left right
front and center. You can't veiw 2 different php sites, from the same server, 
with two different windows of the same browser. Your sessions cross and when you
are logging in and out this TOTALLY sucks...

Actually I will admit I do RESPECT what has been accomplished with PHP and use
many of the Horde's projects...

Anyways this is starting to sound like a trash session and IT ISN'T! It has just
been a long day.

To sum it up, if you spent the time to write your users tools in IML like you
did in PHP, you will find you can develope much stronger and tigher
intergration. All you have to do is get past the fear of saying why am I using
these tools that restrict me soooo much.

Just one last side note as well... When you DO know how to use the UI tools,
they are VERY powerful, the problem is, they are very cryptic, not straight
forward, and buggie... But then hey they are also new as of 4.6... So they will
take time to catch up, they are a WHOLE lot better that MiniMate which is what
we had in 4.00


John Beima
jbeima@palb.com, support@alocalagent.com, and support@alocalchurch.com

P.A.L.B. Systems - Phone: (780)451-1086 - Fax: (780)447-4760
11639-122 Street, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, T5M 0B6

Affordable Web Pages - Phone: (888)932-9990 - Fax: (256)351-7297
2713B Spring Place SW, Decatur, Alabama, United States, 35603



Quoting Russ Mann <tech@khouse.org>:

> > > Why don't you just rewrite the php code in IML... In MANY way
> > > IML is a more
> > > powerful language than php....
> > >
> > When I started the site I created in Interchange I had the
> > choice of doing some things in PHP and some things in IC,
> > and I decided to put everything in Interchange so that
> > there was one session management system, one set of cookies
> > and one place for all the page code.  I do have some PHP
> > on the back-end which allows the proprietors of the store
> > to write articles and organize some things like the
> > hierarchy of sections and products since I wanted some
> > things that Interchange doesn't provide.  I would say
> > that having two systems for the back end is ok, but I
> > wouldn't recommend it for your live site.  John's right.
> > Anything you are doing in PHP you can redo in IC and
> > end up with a more integrated system.
> 
> I use PHP for custom backend development because its much faster than IC,
> both for the coding process and for the speed of page delivery to the end
> user.  I've been considering biting the bullet though, and converting my
> backend stuff to IC, but the problem is that its not easy to make add-ons
> for the UI admin, which is where most of the functionality is missing.  If
> I
> customize the UI, the next release of IC overwrites whatever I've done.
> 
> On IML being more powerful than PHP, that might be a bit of an
> overstatement.  What IML was designed to do it does well, but when you want
> to get outside of that, you're just a perl coder, and PHP trumps perl for
> ease of use in web programming.
> 
> If anything, this is a request for the UI admin to be more customizable,
> just like the regular IC pages.  The meta data thing is great, but doesn't
> translate across everything.  For example, how do you customize the way the
> order listing is displayed?  I'd like to be able to mark items as shipped
> from the listing page instead of having to click through to every item
> shipping status.  This was EASY to do in PHP, but then I had to create the
> customer confirm email in PHP too.  The other thing I had to do was limit
> which items a shipping users sees based on the shipping method, because I
> have offices in USA, New Zealand, UK, Australia, and Canada, that are all
> shipping directly.  There is absolutely NO way to create this permission
> structure in IC Admin, but in PHP, it was cake.
> 
> Any thoughts?
> 
> -RM
> 
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