On 23.02.2008 02:59 Jonathan Vanasco wrote:
I've heard from a few reputable sources that Amazon is looking to
drop mod_perl, and push into another technology ( which I've also
head is likely to be Java ).
They have a HUGE deployment on mp, and have been my prime "Um, not
enterprise? Hello, AMAZON." repsonse.
In a recent issue of the German iX magazine there was a report about a
similar migration (www.mobile.de I think).
There the reasons were, if I remember correctly:
- scaling issues. The underlying design was such that not every
component of the site was easily scalable.
- some of the original developers left, so it was difficult to
maintain the original codebase
- JAVA community with lots of help and high quality tools and libraries.
- the new solution used less resources (they saved a few hundred
servers) and still ran faster.
For me this article showed some important points
- often Perl projects start as quick and dirty solutions that end in
a maintainability nightmare. Of course it is possible to write
code in Perl that meets the best standards, but often Perl is used
when this is not the main focus but when instant results are needed.
- Perl usage is declining. I read some statistics from O'Reilly and
they showed that Perl book sales are going down.
A few years ago the 'P' in LAMP clearly was 'Perl', now it is 'PHP'
in most cases. Developers tend to go (even if slowly) where the money
is.
- Even the great CPAN repository doesn't seem to match what is
available for JAVA. I could see this myself when I needed to write
a Webservice client against a JAVA server with SOAP-Lite or when
I tried to connect to a CORBA based application.
Just my 0.02 Euro
-Michael
I know that people 'in the know' can't comment on record... however
I'm wondering if anyone with second-hand intel has heard , and can
share :
a- what the bottleneck / scaling issues were
b- were these due to apache/mod_perl, or because of the framework
implementation... and this is just an opportunity to switch
technologies while they switch frameworks ( ie, is MP to blame, or
Template Toolkit... and MP is taking a fall since its going to be a
PITA to ditch TT )
c- what the hell the financial projections were on doing this. are
they looking to save on hardware scaling, developer scaling, is the
codebase just unmanageable? this would be a costly transition
// Jonathan Vanasco
w. http://findmeon.com/user/jvanasco
e. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| Founder/CEO - FindMeOn, Inc.
| - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
| FindMeOn.com - The cure for Multiple Web Personality Disorder
| Privacy Minded Web Identity Management and 3D Social Networking
| - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
