Perl Domination in CGI Programming?
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/10/20/1246241.shtml
It seems to be a good candidate to be posted on perl.apache.org site, and
to send people to, when the next "is perl/mod_perl good for CGI and why?"
question hits the list.
It was nice to see the names of the people, who have never posted to the
list, advocating mod_perl -- probably for a reason that most of the people
have no problems with installing and using mod_perl :)
Well if you want a little summary of this huge thread, here we go:
* Perl is cool and fun to code with
* Perl is very fast to develop with
=> Perl is even faster to develop with if you know what CPAN is :)
* Math intensive code and other stuff which is faster in C/C++, plugged in
into Perl with XS/SWIG and transparent to perl user of the modules.
* Most CGI apps do text processing, where perl excels at
* Forking and loading (unless code is shared) a C/C++ optimized CGI
produces an overhead
* Bandwidth is a bigger bottleneck than perl performance (vs C/C++) (not
true for Intranets, and might change for Internet in a number of years)
* For database driven apps, db itself is a bottleneck
=> lots of posts talk about latency vs throughput
* mod_perl, FastCGI, velocigen and perlexec are good solutions for plain
mod_cgi slowness
* other light alternatives to perl and its derivatives mentioned: PHP,
Pyhton
* well, there were almost no voices from the M$ and alike technologies
users, I guess that's because they don't read /. :)
* many said that in many people's minds:
'CGI' eq 'perl' > 0 (the entropy of perl grows bigger :)
What's "worries" me mostly is that too many profeccional developers vote
for java servlets, as a much more efficient solution than mod_perl. The
main reasons are builtin RDBMS connectivity, plus a true pool of
persistant connection handlers/cached prepare statements (for RDBMS
without builtin caches like mysql), and a much smaller memory footprint,
because of the threads. Also Java seems to have a growing base of 3rd
party libraries... but they still don't have a CPAN :)
Well, if the trend continues we ought to learn Java some day :)
_______________________________________________________________________
Stas Bekman mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] www.singlesheaven.com/stas
Perl,CGI,Apache,Linux,Web,Java,PC at www.singlesheaven.com/stas/TULARC
www.apache.org & www.perl.com == www.modperl.com || perl.apache.org
single o-> + single o-+ = singlesheaven http://www.singlesheaven.com
