On Tue, Jul 26, 2005 at 08:07:36AM -0700, Neil Gunton wrote: > I think that people looking for the simpler, "beginner" solution turn to > PHP, whereas the heavier, "enterprise" users tend to go to Java. So maybe > mod_perl/Embperl is stuck somewhere in between in a kind of no mans land, > perceived neither as beginner nor enterprise level. That's a shame, since > we all know there really isn't anything that Java can do that > mod_perl/Embperl can't. But I don't want to be in the position of sour old > programmer crying into his beer about how he "coulda been a contender" but > backed the wrong horse. I'm increasingly getting nervous about basing my > programming experience on something that seems to not have the mindshare in > up and coming young programmers. <snip> > > Advocacy for tools like mod_perl and Embperl may be a way to go, but it > can't really replace "buzz" in the developer community. I think we lost a > lot of that "buzz" when we (as a developer community) took a massive time > out to develop the incompatible Versions 2 of Apache and mod_perl. People > kept hearing that it wasn't ready yet, and so they used something else. But > that's not the main reason, I think. PHP just gained mindshare because it > was so simple and cheerful. It's a lesson to geeks who think all that > matters is technical superiority. If we spent more time making our projects > easy to use and accessible to new users, rather than adding obscure, > complex new features that hardly anybody uses, then maybe our projects > would be more widely adopted.
Another issue with perl is the relative modularity of perl-based solutions, which is an aspect of perl's TMTOWTDI mantra. This is both a strength and a weakness. With PHP, while you can bolt on a number of different templating engines, it's pretty capable for web stuff out of the box, and lots of people/projects just use it like that. Perl isn't - you have to add in your templating-system-of-choice (or CGI), sessions support, database-layer-of- choice, etc. This also means that the 'buzz' around PHP is more localised, where the perl 'buzz' is fragmented across multiple projects - Embperl, HTML::Mason, Template::Toolkit, HTML::Template, etc. Choice is good, of course, but it does fragment the community and the evangelism. I also think that Embperl has lost a fair amount of momentum with the length of time that Embperl2 has been in beta. This isn't intended as a criticism of Gerald - I think it's mostly just some unfortunate timing effects around Embperl2 being almost ready to do just as mod_perl2 got seriously unstable. But whatever the reason, it seems like there's a a lot more activity these days around the HTML::Mason and Template::Toolkit projects. You might also want to have a look at Catalyst (http://catalyst.perl.org) sometime - there's a huge amount of buzz around that these days as perl's answer to Ruby on Rails. My 2c. Cheers, Gavin --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
