Question

I am asking for advise on which programming language is most acceptable for the following situation.

The program will act as the server in a TCP networking application, serving JavaScript clients that output to the browser, using a pre-written framework.

The server program will need to be ‘always-on’, and be capable of dealing with JSON.

My first instinct is to use PHP, because it can run the same web-server, and has pre-existing JSON and TCP functions. Is there a way to run PHP scripts on the server without needing to have a browser open to ‘trigger’ the script execution? – the script will have to be running for hours on end without timing out.

Other languages that are considered are C#, C++, Java.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

node.js

The first example on the homepage shows how easy it is to build servers in it

var http = require('http');
http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'});
  res.end('Hello World\n');
}).listen(8124, "127.0.0.1");
console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:8124/');