Can you guys please let me know as i am curious as to what languages the good control panels are written in ? is it php or C or perl ?

maybe tell me about

Cpanel

Ensim

Plesk

H Sphere

and any ideas ? I plan to start something on these lines.

Ensim Python

HSphere - i'm conjecturing Java, C, and shell scripts.

The control panel I'm wrapping up before New Year's is written with PHP and Perl. The front end piece was developed in PHP while any server related procedures (bandwidth throttling, bandwidth pooling, account creation/suspension/deletion) were coded in Perl to perform the tasks on each machine.

It's a matter which language a developer is more comfortable with and will do the job well. It's seems obvious that server administrators who setup accounts by hands should have some knowledge to code in Perl for certain tasks, so the decision was made that backend to be coded in Perl while the front end was coded in PHP.

JAVA puts too much overhead on each server it runs on, especially if you aren't going to be offering any JAVA related services. The security models is very tight which is good for enterprise level applications, but would be an overkill for small to midsize hosting businesses which may not care too much about the level of security.

Any areas that would require speed would probably be better if coded in C. I'm contemplating on future plans to code the daemon in C as well as bandwidth and quota usage pooling in C. . .

JAVA puts too much overhead on each server it runs on, especially if you aren't going to be offering any JAVA related services.

The JVM might be a bit CPU & Memory hungry but the application will be lightning fast. Java servlets stay in memory once loaded unlike PHP, Perl, and the others. Java is also a very clean language and if coded properly, bugs are rare.

Coding a control panel in 'C' would be good if you planned on writing Apache modules. Running any type of CGI script is slow because the script needs to be loaded and the webserver needs to spawn a new processes for it.

Plesk is PHP anyways.

CPanel looks like C, or perl, not sure on that one.

Virtuozo - is made on Perl, pure perl.

-Brandon
Eryxma Networks Support.

Xanthis : your control panel open source or not ? :)

Sorry, but it's not open source. :(

I posted on the forums looking for a serious admin, but those who were interested flaked out or did not have the experience with areas I need help in.

So we hired a contractor and over the last 4 weeks, we've completed a ton of basic hosting managment (create/suspend/terminate accounts) and clients are able to create/delete emails/forwards. . . Systems level routines were coded in Perl while the front end is written in PHP with Smarty template engine.

We're now wrapping up with the graphics dept the look of the control panel while I add a few more bells and whistles prior to it's launch next month or early January. . .

Oh so perl is the main choice. ahh now i feel bad why i didn't study it that hard at school in our class. maybe cuz Perls' syntax is not too user friendly.

perl is good for text processing/manipulation, which is 90% of what a control panel does. i am still waiting to see a control panel implemented the way it ideally should be - translating all configs into a normalized xml document and processing that.

i hope to see the dream come true some day though.