Best language to write linux services [closed]

Question

I want to create a crawler that scans one single web page and sends me an email in case something is wrong on the page (the page holds some webservers' status - Up/Down).

What would be the best language to write such a service in?

I've considered PHP or Python, but as they are interpreted languages (+PHP has a max time limit that a script runs), I don't think they're the best fit for this.

Also, C/C++ is not an option. I was thinking about Java, since it has Threading and I may need it, but I'm not sure.

Answer 1

Just use the language you are the most comfortable with. This kind of application is not CPU-/memory-bound.

You were mentioning Python. It is interpreted but I really don't see why this would be a problem. Youtube/Tornado/Django/etc. run Python. All the things that you will ever want for your specific purpose are already available as modules (daemonize, http, etc.).

PHP does not seem to be a good fit because of the limit that you mention, but also because you need apache (not completely true, but whatever). Still, it is possible.

Java would also perfectly fit. You can also daemonize your process and use existing libraries.

C/C++ seems a bit to much, but with the available libraries, you should be able to generate some working code very quickly.

As manatwork stressed, bash also just fits...

Well, you guessed it, my point here is that for this kind of application, there is no "best language". There is a family of language which already implement a http_client library of some sort and the others. Your CPU and memory are not limiting. You can just enjoy the language you want. :) But generally speaking, if this is your server, checking your web service is up should be checked internally (cron job, nagios, etc.). From your home you may just want to ping the server to see if the hardware is up and responding.

Answer 2

What I would do is write it in a scripting language such as Perl or Python and then scale up to Java if need to in search of features such as better concurrency management. You always want to use the simplest tool for the job and scale up if you need to. I am a huge fan of both languages and even though I know Java better, I would always try to solve any problem in Perl before resorting to Java. Perl is a great candidate for offline workload processing, especially single-threaded.

Yet another question to be asked is the availability of APIs for the particular application, although nowadays there are APIs and web services for just about anything. Still, I would bet there are more APIs for Java than Perl. I was, however, recently disappointed not to be able to find a Java API for IBM Clear Case. So for some version management stats and monitoring, I used shell invoking their CLI and passing data to Perl for further processing.