General - What Language???

Hi.

I'm required to write an application to filter, sort, categorize and generate a list of keywords. This is for PPC advertising. The list could be as large as 100,000 keywords.

There will be limited database interaction required, Just lots and lots of string searching and string comparisons.

What would language would be best suited for this situation? I have considered perl as I understand it is good for string comparisons. Or possibly Java?

Would a desktop application, possibly written in C++ be more suited to this? and what would be fastest?

I'm considering knocking up a temporary solution in PHP, only because that is my strength but I understand its not really suitable.

Please help,

thanks,

Andrew

Unless an actual interface is needed for this, a small C, Java, or Python program would probably be best.
One of the things I would look for here would be a compiled language vs an interpreted one only because of dealing with the size of the data that you could be dealing with, if written correctly a compiled language would outperform the interpreted one.

Just my opinion.

What OS/platform are you on? But that aside, if you were to mention string manipulation, perl/sed/awk would probably come out on top. There reputation is not undeserved; those three languages are extremely well suited for easily expressed string comparison and manipulation.

I use Python for my scripts, and Ruby is another contender. Both are high level languages, so they make expressing abstract logic easy, and have very good string manipulation capabilities. They also happen to be general programming languages like Perl. I think you should investigate Python and Ruby, and Perl. The first two are pretty easy to pickup.

Java isn't ideal for string manipulation. It's better, than say, PHP, and definitely C.

C and C++ are definitely horrible when it comes to string manipulation. C is definitely the worst. No abstraction at all. C++ is better with the STL. But not that much. Performance? Sure. Simply amazing. Ease in expressing your logic? Not at all.

> I'm required to write an application to filter, sort, categorize and generate a list of keywords.
How often do you need to do this?
- once a week (or less frequent)
- once an hour (or more frequent)

If it's on the infrequent side, then there should be no problem running it as an overnight job. Whether it takes one hour or three hours won't really matter.

> What would language would be best suited for this situation?
Start with the languages you know. Unless you're willing to get someone more specialist in to do the work, the time it would take you to become competent (to create large efficient programs) in any other language has to be measured in months. Can the collective organisation afford to wait that long?

> I'm considering knocking up a temporary solution in PHP, only because that is my strength
Seems like a good idea to me. At least you'll have something to measure at the end of it. Plus you'll have something which gets the job done even if it is a little slow (maybe the performance will be OK, or at least tolerable).

Plus, since you know the language, you'll be able to react much quicker to any requirement changes.

I'm sure PHP has a whole bag of tricks which can be employed to make the code faster if necessary.

Should you decide to re-implement it, at least you'll have a concrete implementation to compare with, and test against.