> The good news is that I currently working on a payed project which includes fixing Embperl for Perl 5.14 & 5.16, so hopefully there will be a new release in a few weeks, which solves all these problems.
That is actually very exciting news. I'd like to thank Gerald Richter for his work and how available he is for all of us. I've never had a support email go unanswered, so Gerald and the community around Embperl are definitely at the heart of its success. About Embperl being alive or not: My job is to maintain a tourism-related system that is now about 15 years old. As most Perl apps, it all started with a simple CGI .pl script which grew and was divided into modules and became a whole app with time. In 2005 the front end of the system was migrated to Embperl and we're still using it to this day. In 2006 we migrated 90% of our PHP code into Embperl and Perl modules. We're still unable to get rid of the PHP module in Apache, because some of our users publish Wordpress blogs. We feel that there are pros and cons in our deployment. Pros: Embperl is extremely stable, well implemented and has been debugged for years. We simply deploy and forget about it. The Embperl templating system is well thought out, there is no strange crosstalk between tags, there are no unexpected behaviors and dependency conflicts in between Embperl sections even though some run at different times(no "magical" and difficult to debug collateral effects, etc). When I did parallel programming projects which used JSP or ASP, I immediately felt the diffculty introduced by the excessive complication and bloat in those technologies. Embperl is very Perl-ish, it makes easy things easy, hard things possible. When our app grew and a whole host of features were added such as a DBIx::Class ORM backend(which in turn pulls in hundreds of modules) we had absolutely zero problems with Embperl, it simply does not mess with the rest of Apache and does not introduce any module incompatibilities to the rest of our app. Apart from the infamous CGI.pm change in namespace which broke our upload forms, we've never had an issue with the thousands of modules running in the background at any given moment. This may seem "obvious" but it's not, it is in fact quite improbable that with so many dependencies to our app, that it actually runs so smoothly. Cons/Ideas: *Book* Embperl could really use a book. There should be a "Camel book" for Embperl IMHO, nowadays it could be an eBook, I'm sure the community would buy it. *Config* The configuration directives currently have two versions, the environment version and the Apache instruction, that was a source of confusion for our team at some point. I think these days that could be unified into one standard configuration system. One global config on a embperl.ini file and a per-application config in a specific location would solve it, getting rid of %ENV. *Perl JAR* Perl does not have a JAR-like packaging system, so deployments are always tough, we can't just deploy a package that is then automatically started as an application on the server. Right now we're using Amazon AMI's for this job, we basically package a whole server as the application, to avoid 2 hours running CPAN compilations before a server can go up. This, of course, is a Perl issue not Embperl, but if you're considering Embperl for a project, you probably should consider this fact. Another Con is, Embperl is very low level in order to achieve speed. This couples it to the OS and to Perl very tightly, thus we get these issues mentioned on this thread now and then, compilation is straight down to platform-dependent binaries. A Embperl installation in our development servers does not run on our production servers. With the price of hardware being ridiculous these days, maybe it'd be a good idea to abstract more of Embperl into pure Perl instead of C, we may lose some efficiency but then again nowadays we're more concerned with parallelism and being able to scale sideways. Scaling horizontally is very difficult with Embperl. Unless you package a whole server as the application, every new machine added to a pool will have to run CPAN and update hundreds of modules, which may take hours. So the main con against Embperl is not actually an Embperl issue: Perl urgently needs an application packaging system like Java already has had for 17 years. Upload a binary and the app is deployed, that's how simple it should be in 2012. Nobody deserves to sit there and watch GCC compilation messages scroll by in this time and age, IMHO. You can afford it as a single developer, but when using Embperl for tens of deployments that is simply undoable. Aside from that, Embperl has survived this mess of "Web 2.0" booms and busts for us. Our REST web services are implemented in Embperl, with JSON in the back. The DBIx::Class ORM has held up to the test of time and our migrations from Apache 1 to 2 to 2.2 and 2.4 have been smooth sailing. So there's our story. Embperl continues to be alive and well for us and we depend on it on a daily basis with historically near zero downtime due to Embperl itself. Cheers! On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 4:39 AM, Jean-Christophe Boggio < embp...@thefreecat.org> wrote: > Le 03/09/2012 09:22, rich...@ecos.de a écrit : > > The good news is that I currently working on a payed project which >> includes fixing Embperl for Perl 5.14 & 5.16, so hopefully there will >> be a new release in a few weeks, which solves all these problems. >> > > Great news, be strong ! > > -- > Jean-Christophe Boggio -o) > embp...@thefreecat.org /\\ > Independant Consultant and Developer _\_V > > > ------------------------------**------------------------------**--------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: > embperl-unsubscribe@perl.**apache.org<embperl-unsubscr...@perl.apache.org> > For additional commands, e-mail: embperl-h...@perl.apache.org > >
