JavaScript Terminology – What Is a Non-Self-Calling Function?

There are a few possibilities (last one would be the easiest and most sensical, in my opinion, except if that's meant to be a long-term and reusable piece of code):

• Use a web-testing framework

  They are meant to do this sort of stuff, so obviousy they do it well. But I think they're a bit heavyweight for what you want to do. For instance, Adel recommended Selenium, which is a great testing tool but a freaking monster to get started with (and will fire up browsers, except if you use the new WebDriver-based API that will use a browser-less driver like HtmlUnit.

  So, that's why I'd recommend, if you go down this route, to just use something like HtmlUnit (which you could invoke from a Java program, or from any other JVM-based language: Groovy, Scala, Clojure...). But I'd still regard this as relatively heavy.

• Use a general-purpose scripting language

  Python, Perl and a herd of others will allow you to write this from scratch quickly, or to reuse an existing library to implement your own HTTP client to send your POST requests.

  If this think is going to be maintained in the future, I'd go with Python. If it's going to be quick and dirty, Perl is a hacker's best friend (and CPAN its favorite sledgehammer).

• Use bare shell scripting and something like curl

  Go even more minimalistic: bare shell-scripting to process your inputs and format your data, some curl invocations to POST to the server, and voila!

  If you're on Windows, Powershell will be your friend.

There are hundreds of other possibilities to do this, I barely mention the ones that come to mind and that I'd use.

If that was my task, I'd probably write an ugly command line that:

• if it's a simple spreadsheet (not something where you'd need to cherry pick cell values):

  1. converts the .xls to .csv,
  2. pipe it through to whatever suits you to transform the data,
  3. pipe it to a curl command to POST.

• if it's a complex spreadsheet (where you'd need to cherry pick cell values):

  • script the data extraction bit,
  • invoke curl or use the scripting language's built-in libs to POST.

I'only use a more advanced testing framework if:

• I'm likely to be asked to do this again for different data formats,
• I'm likely to be asked to do this again for different datasources and target DBs,
• I'm likely to be asked to do this often.

In that case, a more engineered approach does make some sense, for maintainability and extensibility.

In all cases, remember to backup that script and pass it along, and to document it (a README would do) and implement a usage. If they have one, version it in their SCM.

Note: another reason why taking the web-form submission approach might be better than the "direct to SQL" approach is that the server receiving the form might be doing extra checks you aren't aware of at this time.

Not saying it's the case, but maybe security wasn't the only reason.

Good luck with the job.

EDIT: just noticed you tagged this as "PHP". I don't really see why, as that would imply for the code to be server-side (well, you could use PHP for any kind of scripting, but why do this to yourself?)

Three main reasons I can think of:

1. Parent Scope Access
2. Privacy
3. Reduction of names defined in higher scopes

Parent Scope Access: Inline function definitions allow the inline code to have access to variables defined in parent scopes. This can be very useful for many things and can reduce the amount or complexity of code if done properly.

If you put the code in a function defined outside of this scope and then call the code, you would then have to pass any parent state that it wanted to access to the function.

Privacy: Code inside an inline anonymous definition is more private and cannot be called by other code.

Reduction of names defined in higher scopes: This is most important when operating in the global scope, but an inline anonymous declaration keeps from having to define a new symbol in the current scope. Since Javascript doesn't natively require the use of namespaces, it is wise to avoid defining any more global symbols than minimally required.

Editorial: It does seem to have become a cultural thing in Javascript where declaring something anonymously inline is somehow considered "better" than defining a function and calling it even when parent scope access is not used. I suspect this was initially because of the global namespace pollution problem in Javascript, then perhaps because of privacy issues. But it has now turned into somewhat of a cultural thing and you can see it expressed in lots of public bodies of code (like the ones you mention).

In languages like C++, most would probably consider it a less-than-ideal practice to have one giant function that extends across many pages/screens. Of course, C++ has namespacing built in, doesn't provide parent scope access and has privacy features so it can be motivated entirely by readability/maintainability whereas Javascript has to use the code expression to achieve privacy and parent scope access. So, JS just appears to have been motivated in a different direction and it's become somewhat a cultural thing within the language, even when the things that motivated that direction aren't needed in a specific case.