New to iControl - What Language to Use

Hi Eric, the question of what language to pick is a tricky question. Here's the languages I can work my way around and some thoughts on each

PERL: If you are a mac/unix person, then this is probably the obvious choice as it's installed by default on those systems. You'll just need to install the SOAP::Lite package with CRYPT::SSLeay for the https connections. The downside to perl is that it's a loosely typed language where you need to build up the parameters yourself. It's not hard, but takes a bit of learning to get over. I originally started with perl when developing iControl so there are a bunch of examples in the iControl CodeShare to reference. I also use this on Windows without any problem by the way.

.NET: If you are a windows person, then the .Net library I wrote makes it super easy to integrate iControl into your C or VB app environment. It's not scripting per-say but if you know VB/C, it's very easy to setup and get running with. The fact that this is strongly typed (meaning you can't compile it uness you get the parameters correct) help with beginner development.

POWERSHELL: Again, if you are on windows but want a scripting environment, Powershell might be for you. I built a set of Cmdlets that wrap the .Net assembly mentioned above so you have full access to our APIs but can use it from a more loosely typed command line (or by building scripts). This is my primary environment today as I like the introspection benefits that you get (auto-complete, etc). It still looks like a .Net library, but a bit more flexible. There are also a lot of tech tips and codeshare samples based on PowerShell. Look in the iControl wiki.

JAVA: This will work equally well across platform. It behavies like the .NET library in that you need to write java code, compile it, and then run it like you would a windows executable. I personally find this a bit too much overhead for me, but I've never really been a java person at heart. There are a lot of customers who are using the java library with success.

Hope this helps. If/when you do pick a language, let us know if we can help out with implementation issues.

-Joe