I re-wrote the Harp-L Archives software in PHP that I use on my HarpAmps.com website. It turns out Java is too tempermental and crashed three or four times a month for up to a day at a time. For those who are interested in the technical details, I wrote my own PHP program to read ZIP files like a database. PHP 4 doesn’t have a Zip Library built in (at least not by default) so I had to write my own.
Java was thought to be the language of the future, but in practice it breaks easily and crashes regularly. If a site is running very slow, you can be sure that it’s Java based.
The new software uses a Mod-rewrite trick so it looks like 111,000 web pages, but it’s only one PHP file and 10 zip files. Pretty cool stuff, if you’re a programmer. Harp players will be less impressed.