OT - looking for feedback per development tools

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2009-02-05 at 16:50 -0700, Kevin Kempter wrote:
> Hi All;
> 
> We're preparing to embark on a new development project. It will eventually be 
> released dual projects similar to Red Hat with a commercially supported side 
> and a leading edge open source side.
> 
> 
> The project will pull data from a database and present info to users. We'll 
> need a graph/chart component and a way to generate html, PDF and spreadsheet 
> reports/downloads. It will be a web based interface.
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1) I'm thinking we'll write the initial commercial (closed source) code in C. 
> Anyone have any thoughts/alternative suggestions ?
> 
> 2) anyone know of a good source of C library routines (something like CPAN) ?
> 
> 3) Any thoughts on the methods to generate XML via C ?
> 
> 4) Any suggestions per the generation of the PDF, HTML, etc reports on screen 
> and for download ? maybe php within the web front end? a set of C routines to 
> be called based on basic report parameters? others ?
> 
> 
> Thanks in advance for your feedback...
----
http://www.rubyonrails.org

of course, if you want to do all sorts of disparate programming like C
and PHP, etc. knock your socks off.

Craig