EDI in linux (everone PLEASE read)

[Brad De Vries]

Ben, my first recommendation would have to be C/C++
for the translation engine.  That piece, more than any
other, needs the speed.

I would also recommend Perl for the front end where we
must determine what we have, what it's going to
become, who is it from and to whom it is going.  I
would make this recommendation because of Perl's
string handling capabilities.

My last recommendation is that the database, assuming
there will be one, should be open source, MySQL or
PostreSQL, or the connection to the database should be
open, ODBC.  This will reduce licensing problems.

One other point of interest is that over the last few
years, I've seen a couple of packages, namely Gentran
and Seeburger, that store everything in an XML format.
 I must confess that initially this didn't make sense
to me but I have come to realize that it makes a lot
of sense for portability, extensibility, and I'm sure
several other "ities".

Wow, three recommendations and a point of interest,
just like a good sermon.  I hope I didn't miss my
calling.

Brad.
--- Ben Duncan <bns at meta3.net> wrote:
> Although everone has a favorite language. when
> designing such a 
> system, one must compare cababilties,
> ease of programming, acceptance, and extensiability.
> 
> Perl, being a favorite of many people, I find
> lacking in handling 
> easily, the "3" dimension strings and arrays that
> would be
> required. Python seems to handle these strings and
> file access in a 
> more straight forward (ok GROUP everone chime in
> here,
> you want hurt my feelings on pro's and con's of
> languagues to use).
> 
> C would get the job down, but be take a lot of
> codeing. C++, I have 
> absolutely NO CLUE, as well as JAVA, since I find
> Object Oriented Programming - strange -.
> 
> GNU/COBOL would work because COBOL is designed to
> manipulate DATA in 
> that fashion ( or as an alternative
> KOBOL from The Kompany - which is a Commercial COBOL
> compiler, but 
> priced at $40 USD - which is
> within my budget).
> 
> Interrupted languages such as Perl, Python, Tk/Tcl,
> would probably get 
> slow in having to deal with such large
> characters strings, as used in EDI ...
> 
> But, then thats' why I belong to this group. Even
> with 26 Years 
> experience in "Data Processing", I find input from
> this group can help make these decisions, such as
> what would be the 
> best langauge to use, extremely valuable.


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! News - Today's headlines
http://news.yahoo.com