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Perrin Harkins wrote :
| [...] [W]e have to face the fact that someone who knew enough about | Perl and apache to write an embedded interpreter module still | thought that mod_perl was some kind of limited CGI replacement. | This means we are not getting the word out very well, and it's | distressing.
Sad but true. Although I've yet to take that long-overdue deep dive into MP2, I consider myself an experienced MP1 hacker (I wrote an HTTP reverse-proxy in it, and also did most of the effort writing no less than a web application framework - for those who can grok french or can use the Babelfish, see http://conferences.mongueurs.net/2004/talk/6). During those projects, the only place where I saw it clearly stated that mod_perl is "program Apache the way you like in Perl" instead of "CGI on steroids" is the Eagle Book - which for the record, is an O'Reilly book titled "Writing Apache Modules in Perl and C" by Lincoln Stein and Doug McEachern, and the name "Eagle Book" comes from the fact that the cover animal is, you guessed it, an eagle (http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0014.html). Even *that* bibliographic data was a pain for me to retrieve from the mailing list archive!
Online documentation on anything in the mod_perl guts is very, very scarce, and I had to RTFS more than once even to perform basic mod_perlish tasks such as writing a subclass of Apache::RegistryNG. Even the Eagle Book itself is sub-useful in places (e.g. the infamous ass_backwards stuff), and other parts of the Apache API visible from mod_perl has to be guessed from the "writing Apache modules in [...] C" section. At least this is how things were two years ago: now that I am "in the know", I don't need documentation all that much anymore and therefore my point of view could well be outdated.
On the bright side, you guys are doing quite a good job at keeping mod_perl on the radar of many pointy-haired bosses, and I understand that this marketing crusade cannot but take the CGI-and-performance route when the competition is Java. Still, the techs out there hear about mod_perl's true powers mostly through hearsay. What about setting up some tech-oriented wiki to tip the balance backwards for the rest of us? This would be a great place to link the press releases to when MP2 final is announced.
- -- Dominique QUATRAVAUX Ingénieur senior 01 44 42 00 08 IDEALX
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