I've been tasked to create and maintain a web browser based interface to replace several of the manual tasks that we perform now.
I currently have a "shakey" but working program written in Perl (2779 lines) that uses basic Expect coding, but it has some limitations that require a great deal of coding to get around. Because of this I am going to do a complete rewrite and want to do it "right" this time.
My question is this... What would be the best language to use to create a web based interface to perform SSH/Telnet tasks that we would normally do manually? Keep in mind the following requirements:
Runs on a CentOS Linux system v5.10
Http will be served by Apache2
This is an INTRANET site and only accessible within our organization.
User load will be light. No more that 5 users accessing it at one time.
perl 5.8.8, php 5.3.3, python 2.7.2 are available... Not sure what other languages to check for, or what modules might be installed in each language.
The web interface will need to provide progress indicators and text output produced by the remote connection, in real time as it is generated.
If we are running our process on multiple hosts, they should be in individual threads so that they can run side by side, not sequentially.
I want the ability to "trap" on specific text generated by the remote host and display an alert to the user - such as when the remote host generates an error message.
I would like to avoid as much client side scripting (javascript/vbscript) as I can.
Most users will be on Windows PC's using Chrome or IE as a browser.
Users will be downloading the resulting output so they can process it as they see fit.
I currently have no experience with "Ajax" or the like.
Most of my coding experience is old 6809 assembly, Visual Basic 6, and whatever I can cut/paste from online examples in various languages (hence my "shaky" Perl program)
My coding environment is Eclipse for remote code editing, but I prefer stuff like UltraEdit if I can get a decent syntax file for the language I'm using.
I do have su access on the server, but I'm not the only one using this server so I can't just upgrade/install blindly as I might impact other software currently running on the machine.
One reason that I'm asking here, instead of searching (which I did) is that most replies were, "use language 'xyz', but you need to use an external SSH connection" - like I'm using Expect in my Perl script. Most also did not agree on what language that 'xyz' should be.
...so, after this long posting, can someone offer some advice?
