So I'm thinking that my super-secret project really needs to do things the cheap way which means going with open source software for the database and application server. MySQL 5 looks really good and they finally added triggers, views, and stored procedures so that one is an easy choice (although I don't know how anybody ever considered using it at the enterprise level without those features). PHP was the obvious choice for the programming language so I put a book onto my O'Reilly Safari account and spent parts of the last 2 days learning the basics. Well, I am thoroughly disappointed. It is Perl without the power (you need to know how much I hate Perl to understand how damning a statement that is). There is no decent variable scoping (!?!?), no good way to write object oriented code, session management is pathetic and slow (stored in text files? come on!), and it repeats my pet-peeve of Perl being used in a Web environment in that it is simply outputting text that happens to be HTML formatted, not working with HTML (its purpose) to enhance the simple tags that make up the page. Also, I don't see how you can make a passable MVC structure with the language. I'm really disappointed. Either I can use it and write pages I consider to be clunky and not scalable or go with ColdFusion. ASP.NET has its own set of problems so I prefer not to use that. Man, after all the hype I expected much more from PHP than capable but exceedingly basic lameness.