java

A web developer's quest for the ideal application platform always seems to be a never-ending journey. What may appear to be the perfect package today is likely to be discarded tomorrow in favor of an even better one. Drupal is an excellent PHP-based content management system (CMS) upon which to build web applications, but in an enterprise environment, integrating Drupal modules and content with back-end databases and systems can be challenging. Quercus, a Java-based implementation of the PHP language by Caucho Technology, offers the potential to ease these interconnections.

Even though many Linux distributions make a Tomcat package available from their repositories, I prefer to download the binary directly from http://tomcat.apache.org and set up a custom installation. This gives me greater control over where everything goes, and more flexibility in regard to upgrades.