Please review this application that has been build to run with ACT! to
help automate the "normal" tasks of a sales team.

http://www.nwoods.com/act/sam.htm

I used to run ACT! but have since moved over to SugarCRM
(www.SugarCRM.com) and I really miss this SAM program we had working
with ACT!

What I need to know is is this type of complex programming possible in
PHP?  More to the point,  After you review this weblink and the
program features, Can this written to integrate seamlessly with
SugarCRM?

On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being a large project, how big of a task
would it be to write this type of program in PHP?  Average time
required to write such a program?

Thanks!
Jamie

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Clarification of Question by jamieinnh-ga on 06 Apr 2005 15:21 PDT

Thanks for the comment.   To add to this, Since PHP wouldn't be the
lanuage to handle such a program, what other suggestions would you
offer?   Something that would run next to the PHP application
seamlessly, or without much trouble.   The program on the website is
written in sanscript.   Can this be used in connection, or modified to
be used with my PHP application?

I have seen Applications that run with java, and Tomcat and other
things, but these are generally harder to run on a shared server, and
I am not ready to bring my server in-house.

My current host only has PHP 4.3.10 installed so the extras from PHP 5
wouldn't help.

In general, you can do most things with PHP now, it's on version 5
which has full OO support and it mainly stolen from the good bits
about java (such as try / catch) and c (such as assignement with
if-statements).

However, I really don't think it would be sensible. PHP is generally a
scripting language and despite its attempts, is not suitable for
developing real applications, it's slow and it's messy, and all it's
really good for is small web sites with a bit of database
functionality.

>>However, I really don't think it would be sensible. PHP is generally a
scripting language and despite its attempts, is not suitable for
developing real applications,

I would like to differ. IMHO, yahoo is a big site that has the latest
applications running on their servers and the yahoo pages are in PHP.
Infact the latest yahoo 360 is also delivered by PHP