I could use some advice on the best rout for doing a web enabled database application. I am a very experienced Delphi developer with a great deal of non-web experience. On my team I have some other members with basic Delphi experience and some very good Oracle developers. I havn't messed with web page design much, but that's not what we need anyway. We are going to use an Oracle back end but need a middle and front solution and quite frankly don't know where to begin. Because I like Borlands tools it would be nice to use their stuff (Delphi or JBuilder), but really I just want to do whats best. The Oracle guys are saying Oracle Forms are the way to go, but I haven't ever messed with them that mutch and I think they look pretty clunky. Is there anybody with this kind of experience out there that can give me a good place to start? This is going to be a large project that needs to be scalable to handle up to 10,000-15,000 concurrent users, though initially it will only be in the hundreds. I will be grateful for any advice I can get here (plus it will justify my looking at this web page during office hours).

Probably your best bet is going to be either using PHP or Java servlets, which itself may or may not involve JSP. I've dealt with the Oracle stuff, and it is horribly clunky. We threw it away within a week of trying. Depending on your exact application, it's likely that the main portion of the load will be on your database and your network, so I would get your Oracle guys to concentrate on making Oracle work well. As long as you have programmers reasonably experienced in database programming, you should be okay no matter what exact solution you choose. The main advantage to PHP and servlets is going to be cost, relative ease of use, as compared to most of the proprietary solutions, flexibility, and the ease of finding help. Of course, that may all be moot if you need to support all of your 10,000 users on a single Sparc 5. Then it might behoove you to look at those proprietary solutions, as their advantage is usually that they're more efficient, at least in my experience.

The other big problem I see you having is in web page design. I've always found it to be much easier if you get a designer to work with you at the beginning to mock up what your web site should look like, with no real back-end. Just fake it. That allows your programmers to not have to worry about looks and usability too much when they should be busy programming; they can just plug data into preexisting templates.

Yeah -- I definitely recommend JSP + Java servlets. For development environment, Eclipse 2.0 just kicks a$$ (www.eclipse.org) -- and it's free. Grab Apache Tomcat or JBoss for a development app server (also free) and McKoi or MySQL as your development database and you can save a ton of money on oracle developer licenses. We do all our development on Tomcat w/ Cloudscape developer and then towards the end of development we move it to Oracle on Tomcat or Oracle on WebSphere to do testing. It works out pretty well for us.

I definitely agree with wfaulk -- get someone who can do the page design, layout, and navigation -- programmers suck at that. What we usually do is discuss how the basic flow will work, then have a JSP/HTML person go off and do nice looking pages while the developers go write the backend stuff (and sometimes REALLY ugly versions -- simply html w/ links just to test their stuff). Then once the API's are done, we join the nice JSP's with the code from the ugly ones and then we're good to go.

I don't have much PHP experience, so I can't really comment on that, but I've been doing Java stuff for a while now, and there are some pretty cool things in there to work with.

Definitely look at Eclipse as a development environment -- it takes JBuilder over it's knee and delivers a series of spanks.

Mike

PHP and mySQL. I use it for all my stuff and love it. Can't beat free too. PHP compiles into Apache (if on a unix host) and is very, very fast. mySQL is pretty fast too. I hear postGreSQL is nice too.