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Is PHP the right choice here ?

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2012 6:01 am
by spelltox
Hi guys,

I'm developing a website (with little experience) that is providing info to customers, What it should actually do is query some external websites, retrieve some data from them, then display it to the user in nice formatted fashion.

I've done such thing before in non-web programming languages (visual basic, etc), but never in PHP or such.

I've downloaded some PHP framework that is able to parse html pages, but after some time that the script is running it is stopped and says that "script time limit exceeded".

The problem is that i'm not sure if PHP is the right choice for this task.

I'm using standard hosting account and don't want to purchase VPS or Dedicated server for this task.

My questions are : 1. Is this possible ? 2. Which languages\technologies should i use ? 3. Security aspects. 4. Samples / Code snippets / Articles / Anything else that might help.

Thanks, SpellTOx.

Re: Is PHP the right choice here ?

Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2012 7:36 am
by Celauran
spelltox wrote:What it should actually do is query some external websites, retrieve some data from them, then display it to the user in nice formatted fashion.
Sounds simple enough. How are you retrieving this data? cURL? SOAP? Something else?
spelltox wrote:but after some time that the script is running it is stopped and says that "script time limit exceeded".
Exactly how much data are we talking about here? Scripts shouldn't really time out under normal circumstances.

Re: Is PHP the right choice here ?

Posted: Tue Feb 07, 2012 10:39 am
by spelltox
I've found a php framework that parses the html,
i know nothing about cURL and SOAP.

The thing is that fetching and parsing the web pages take quite some time,
so i need a way to run some background script that will do the fetching&parsing and when done it can set some flag in my database.

The questions are :

1. how do i run that other script in the background ? (i didn't find any multi-threading support in php).
2. how do i let the user know that processing is done and show him the results ?