Perl Domination in CGI Programming

1999-11-03 Thread Stas Bekman


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-+ = singlesheavenhttp://www.singlesheaven.com




Re: Perl Domination in CGI Programming

1999-11-03 Thread Jeffrey Baker

Stas Bekman wrote:
[slashdot summary snipped]

 Well, if the trend continues we ought to learn Java some day :)

Ha!  Well they are going to have to make JServ operable at some point if
they want to replace Perl.  Seriously, could they make their
configuration process more opaque?  I went to the JServ morning session
in Monterey, and I was extremely disappointed.  The whole first hour was
spent on building and configuring the servlets.  They seem to have
several non-orthogonal configuration files that live in different places
and have very hard to explain syntax and on and on and on.

Blah. Even as a developer I want something that has a simple and
straight-forward installation procedure.  For the operations department
it is even worse.  JServ has a long way to go before it doesn't suck in
that regard.

And don't even get me started on their session handling and load
balancing [sic].

-jwb
-- 
Jeffrey W. Baker * [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Critical Path, Inc. * we handle the world's email * www.cp.net
415.808.8807



Re: Perl Domination in CGI Programming

1999-11-03 Thread Victor Zamouline

 
 * Most CGI apps do text processing, where perl excels at
 
 Well, if the trend continues we ought to learn Java some day :)
 

Java is magnificent, but VERY BURDENSOME when it comes to doing any kind
of text processing or designing tricky structures. There are plenty of
packages and tools written for Java that make it POSSIBLE to do it all,
but it is still very AWKWARD to code, as the language is the same.

Java is good for very technical applications, not good at all when you
want to relax and program to have fun.

I don't really think it will become a competitor for clever and
ambitious projects.

Victor.