Overkill?

I decided to start a separate blog to chronicle whatever work I get done on my Kriegsland website, more as an incentive for myself to continue than anything else.

My work has since brought me into contact with an interesting cross section of available technologies and I think one's quest to set up a new game web-site is probably an interesting enough topic to read about.

I'm still pretty much at the proof of concept stage and I have a very very basic php website together. It's possible to log on and it stores your session, it also fetches all of the update news from a database. Let's have a look at what it's built from.

PHP: This is the incredibly popular language for building modern dynamic websites with. It's competitors would be ASP.NET (expensive) and perhaps Java Servlets (A bit unwieldy, also requires an application server). PHP in my opinion wins out easily as it's free and simple to use.

MySQL: I suppose this almost classes as a no-brainer, MySQL is a modern fully featured and free transactional database. Very often used in commercial applications and well tried and tested. One place where it falls down is support but if you mind what you are doing you should never need any for a project of this size.

I also toyed with the concept of developing an off-line "simulator app" for the fine tuning of the combat engine. I looked into C# for this and while it has streamlined many of the tasks required things got messy when I was looking into a way to transfer XML into objects. There didn't seem to be anything that automated the process available and that, in addition to the pointless duplication of effort between C# and PHP meant that I decided not to go down that road.

And that's pretty much where I am now. I'll post next time something interesting comes up, it could be a while but that's the nature of the beast.