>
> This is a plea for help. Here is the situation:
[situation snipped]
> My belief is that the LAMP type route provides a very cost effective,
> portable and scalable solution but I concede that bigger backends are
> needed for volume transaction systems.
Funnily enough I am about half way through an article for the new
www.onlamp.com site that is quite relevant to your situation. I'll whip
myself to get it finished soon.
> The help I need is in answering some questions:
>
> What big corporates are using perl in web development and
> how/for what ?
Lots. In the last couple of weeks alone I've run across one operating stock
exchange heavily built around Perl, and the content management system /
e-marketplace hubstorm (www.hubstorm.com) is almost entirely Perl based.
Neither are trivial applications, although I don't vouch for how effective
they are or if Perl was the right tool to use.
> Why perl is better (or could be better) than a combination of
> ASP/VBScript/VB/MTC
How long have you got? :-). On the grounds that its better to attack
weaknesses than strengths, I'd concentrate on:
VBscript is a poor language.
ASP environment is very hard to debug - even worse than mod_perl :-0
ASP provides a poorer abstraction model than the latest perl offerings -
TemplateToolkit, AxKit and the like.
Locked into MS technologies.
> Is there any benchmarking available of salary bands for
> differing skills,
> i.e. are perl guys much more than ASP guys who can also do
> the other bits ?
> Any other arguments I should be making !
Yeah, Perl people cost more than ASP people and they're frickin impossible
to find, and vary wildly in quality. This is IMHO Perl's single greatest
barrier to acceptance, and in business terms it's an entirely valid point.
> My big problem is that with a huge investment in the MS code
> base, I am
> fighting a rearguard action to prevent having to adopt MS stuff, just
> because we've already spent loads on it, which seems false
> economy to me.
It isn't necessarily a false economy. You can't tell until you can show what
the ongoing costs are of the Perl system vs the MS system. Either you can
get out Excel and start doing a spreadsheet, putting in cost assumptions,
and showing that your way pays off over n months, or you can argue that no
switch should be made until the two strategies can be compared for cost
effectiveness. Either way I'd be very interested in the results :-)
As for 'chucking out code' - well, most code gets chucked out pretty soon.
Is that ASP stuff really so good it's worth keeping? What you normally want
to avoid chucking out is knowledge - familiarity with APIs, knowledge of the
strengths and weaknesses of a platform, bugs to avoid, tricks of the trade,
and so forth. Ask yourself if you really have anything here vis a vis the
ASP code? Or is just alot of lines of nothing very exciting?
> My preferred approach would be to stick with MS tech for
> maintenance of the
> existing code base and continue to sub out for developers,
> and use open
> source tech for new development, with commercial backends
> when we need that
> level of sophistication. Anyone have any comment on this ?
I would not especially recommend Perl for an environment with high staff
turnover, such as might be the case with contract work. Is your internal
documentation and structure good enough that new perl programmers can easily
get up to speed on the project?
> Thank you for your attention, all advice gratefully received.
>
