Which Development Environment/Tools For FreeBSD + PostgreSQL Service?

Wed Sep 29 00:52:32 PDT 2004

Hello All,

We are a company looking for a good development environment/tool(s) for a service-type application. The OS is FreeBSD and the database will be PostgreSQL. The first emphasis is placed on reliability, with secondary emphasis on performance. Third in importance would be the richness of the language/features and avoidance of "plumbing" code.

- Is this the right place to be asking about development tools? Since this involves FreeBSD, we thought it might be appropriate.

- We do not need any GUI. The programs will either run from the shell, or as services.

- C/C++ comes to mind, but which flavour of compiler/debugger/third party add-ons/editor? An advantage here is the fact that this language is well established which should improve reliability to some extent (if we are careful with pointers). A disadvantage would be the extensive use of pointers, the cryptic and unreadable look of the code and the fact that C/C++ is getting a bit long in the tooth.

- We are considering the Borland tools (JBuilder/Kylix) since we are familiar with Borland tools and like their database connectivity, rich components and elegant looking code (less plumbing). But on the other hand, we don't need any GUI, and we had some problems in the past with reliability. Do you have any thoughts on this?

- We would prefer not to use ODBC/JDBC, and instead interface directly to the database. We had some bad experience in the past regarding reliability and performance. We can either use the library provided by Postgres or write our own wrappers to make things more readable.

- We would prefer not to use an interpreted language such as Python, Java, and Perl etc for performance reasons. We know that Java can be compiled, but is it a good solution without using JDBC? How about reliability?

Are there any particularly elegant solutions you have experience with? Thank you for your help.

Tom