I am interested in writing a large scale, cross platform payroll/hr/gl appl
entirely in php + mysql Innodb (for transaction support).
I have 2 php programmers 1 asp/foxpro/access programmer to help me.
I see 4 big hurdles to overcome in my php design: Large Libraries, Long
Processes, Reporting, Loosely Typed Variables
1) Payroll apps require large tax libraries (federal, every state and
locality).
Now If I were interested in using ASP (which I'm not) I would probably
compile these libraries into a .dll that would be loaded in-process with
scripts that require it.
Since I'm using Php I would most likely create a few really huge include
files "fedtax.inc.php","statetax.inc.php","localtax.inc.php" that had all of
my income tax calculations.
I'm guessing these three libraries will be about 200Kb combined and need
to be loaded often. Is it feasible to create such large includes for an app
that will likely have 1000+users.
Is there a better way to keep these functions available to my scripts
without using these large includes?
2)Long Processes.
There are 2 types of users...general and admin. There will be only
about 5 administrators.
The admin users will need to run long processes that take about 5-15
minutes each. They cannot timeout and they must be done throughout the day
while general users are working in the application as well. Is there a
big problem with this? What steps should I take to ensure these long
processes complete and do not timeout.
3)Reporting.
I think I can get by with HTML reports for the most part. however checks
and tax forms require precisely positioned reporting abilities.
I think that I will be better off using an external reporting
application (crystal,access,FoxPro etc) to generate these reports. But if
I do that
then I'm sure I'll have to duplicate some of my coding efforts, since
there is no way to achieve interop between these languages. Is there anyway
to minimize the need to duplicate code?
4)Loosely Typed Variables.
I fear it might be to simple in PHP to have a dollar amount converted to
a string and become rounded or truncated, because php's loose type.
This might be a smaller issue than I think? Is there a way to strictly
enforce types/conversions so my numerics stay numerics?
[Big application...Why would I want ot use PHP?]
1)The system can be developed on a laptop running xitami+win98 and then
deployed on a high perfomance unix+apache machine without any adjustments :)
2)I won't be locked into vendor specific solutions (Sun EJB server/M$ .Net
server)
3)I can teach the basics to new guys in about 1 week.
4)I just really like php, I've used it for 3 1/2 years and it's never failed
me.
But If there's a better framework for developing such an app, please let me
know.
Thanks a lot,
Will
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