Hi, I think that's the point. Embperl is missing an active community. Nearly all of the work is done by myself and (as for most of us) my time is limited. Also Embperl is still alive and I will keep to maintain it, there could be much more going on if the work would be shared by more people. To get it back into a living project it would necessary to
- Update the website - Update the documentation (for example Embperl::Form is nearly undocumented and I guess unused, also it's very powerfull) - Creating packages for the main linux distribution - Writing articles (I don't think it's realistic to have a book, but having articles about it would help a lot) As already said I am about to create a new release for Perl 5.14&5.16 and I hope to get some time to do some (minimal) updates on the website (so the project doesn't look dead, as it seems from the website right now), but that's all I can do for now. It would be really great, if anybody has a chance to do some of the above work ( other ideas are always welcome) Gerald From: Ragnar Hákonarson [mailto:rag...@signal.bz] Sent: Tuesday, September 04, 2012 3:00 AM To: 'Jose Fonseca'; embperl@perl.apache.org Subject: RE: Status of Embperl? I just want to join Jose and air my gratitude to Gerald for his outstanding work and, not least, his availability which has been acknowledged by many over the years. I started using Embperl in 1999 and there are projects under my hat that are still at large today utilising Embperl. I, as many, do not question the robustness nor concept behind Embperl but have started to question whether Embperl is something to utilise in a new project. Embperl addresses current needs but the apparent lack of enthusiasts behind it today (apart from Gerald himself and a few die hard including myself) does beg the question whether it is as a wise choice for future needs. I for one would love to see the return of the vibrant community once associated with Embperl and, as far as I can see, the sudden influx in activity on this mailing list tells me there may very well still be life in this "animal". Time to join forces behind Gerald and bring Embperl back to the forefront? From: Jose Fonseca [mailto:zefons...@gmail.com] <mailto:[mailto:zefons...@gmail.com]> Sent: 03 September 2012 16:08 To: embperl@perl.apache.org <mailto:embperl@perl.apache.org> Subject: Re: Status of Embperl? > 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 <mailto:embp...@thefreecat.org> > wrote: Le 03/09/2012 09:22, rich...@ecos.de <mailto: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 <mailto:embp...@thefreecat.org> /\\ Independant Consultant and Developer _\_V --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: embperl-unsubscr...@perl.apache.org <mailto:embperl-unsubscr...@perl.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: embperl-h...@perl.apache.org <mailto:embperl-h...@perl.apache.org>
