Eric wrote:
In Advanced Perl Programming, under the heading the case for scripting. That is something that I think would fit in very well in a
talk. Lots of people know there are an endless number of very cool impressive things you can do with Perl and mod_perl. The amazing one liners, the tricks that make people slap their head. But it seems to me the idea of the big model, the whole structure that will encompass
everything you do in your organization is what many are striving
for, so cool things are looked at almost as negative.
It's as if someone's looking for an integrated transport solution and you show them a car that's great for doing wheelspins.
IMHO that is why you see big corp. that use mod_perl using Mason, at least as a starting point. I think the other aspect of mod_perl that I would want to push very hard is the deep hooks into Apache. Just as a small example of something I have not yet figured out, but am pretty sure I can find a way with mod_perl, I want to capture STDERR and redirect it to an "in memory file" There are a bunch of cpan module that do something like this, but I started to wonder about how that works with Apache itself since STDERR gets written to the error_log(please don't give me the answer BTW) :)
Oops. Nearly did :)
The main point I am trying for here in a clumsy way is that I am not sure how many people developing web apps with other tools are thinking in terms of how to alter the way Apache behaves but rather are thinking about how their app deals with Apache. I think that is a massive difference and a good expression of the power of mod_perl.
I'm sure that's true but it's still a justification for mp that plays best with geeks. The majority of web applications that people are actually developing (as opposed to the ones they aspire to) are actually fairly simple things and they're often created by developers who come from a web design background rather than a computer science one. They can generally do everything they need with PHP or ASP.
I'm sure one of the reasons for the popularity of Perl as a command line tool is the low cost of entry: within a few minutes of seeing your first Perl script you can knock up a useful five liner of your own. For the web PHP and ASP occupy that space. They're probably already installed so you can dip your toe in the water with a simple
<?php echo "Hello, World" ?>
and build from there.
-- Andy Armstrong
-- Report problems: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
