On Fri, Jun 22, 2001 at 02:57:05PM +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> I have heard, time and time again, that Perl is great for scripting
> small websites, but that, for large websites, with lots of
> simultaneous connections, you should better use an application
> server + servlets, or even better, WebObjects. What do you all think
> about this?
There is very little in the use of perl or servlets that could effect
the number of simultaneous connections. The longer something is
processing on the server, the more resources it is using and
eventually the less capable it is to handle other connections. You can
find benchmarks that put either Perl or Java as the faster for a
particular task. I could point to the benchmarks I believe and ignore
the ones I don't and skew the analysis in a particular direction, but
lets just say both languages are roughly comparible and code
optimization is preferable to a change in language if performance is
unacceptable. Any statement claiming a clear performance victory of
servlets over perl is seriously misguided. Besides, you can always by
bigger better hardware, or for most web applications, multiple load
balanced machines.
At my work at boston.com, all of the newer sites that we do are
mod_perl based. (www.boston.com is still an iplanet server, for
various historical reasons, but the newer sites, ae.boston.com,
digitalmass.boston.com, etc.) are all mod_perl based, and they all
receive a substantial amount of traffic.
The issue that is harder to quantify is development time, and defect
rate. I think most people would agree the perl is much better suited
to small tasks. Most people on this list probably feel that perl is
better suited for large tasks too. From personal experience, I'd say I
develop comparible applications much faster in perl than java, but
occationally miss some of the static type checking and exception
checking that java provides.
The process of determining which technologies to use is one of the
most important parts of the job when developing a software system, and
it shouldn't be left to "oh, I heard that..." arguments, or to replies
on mailing lists.
--
"The buddy system is when you go somewhere with a buddy. The bear
system is when you go somewhere with a bear." - Samantha Langmead, age 3 1/2
