Hi, there:
just subscribed to this advocacy list.
First, sorry to Frank. I was replying his email in the user list but was wrongly put his address as the subject. :-(
Please let me share some of my experiences in using mod_perl.
There are four factors when choose a particular language:
1) easy to program
cgi is very easy to use, and php is easy. mod_perl and java servlet are hard.
For most people I have worked with/for, this is number one. The rest can take a hike. Anything else is often considered a bias or religion. THAT is why PHP is so big, quick and dirty rules. And remember, it is about this perception, not the reality and it is not considering the consequences.
PHP is loaded with special functions for things that are just not that fing hard to do, but they make things easier, at least that is the opinion. I myself HATE big APIs that is why I have avoided Java to a large degree, and PHP is just insane, esp with not even being able to have consistent names for the functions that keep getting piled on. It is also getting a lot easier to do MVC with PHP. For example a guy ported CGI::Application to PHP and that combined with Smarty template is pretty close to what you would be doing with Perl and does avoid at least a lot of the mess I see with a lot of PHP collections.
2) speed
mod_perl is fast but php is fast too (if not faster), and so is Java servlet.
I did some benchmarks on our servers, without tweaking/Zend PHP can dog it just as bad as CGI, assuming it is not running as a CGI which is still not at all uncommon. It actually surprised me. But like you were saying what it does is enough for what we need on those servers. I was comparing a nothing PHP script to a mod_perl Registry big ass app too. Yes, just our one case..
3) capacity/scalable
mod_perl is very scalable --- I mean, one can properly config a single server to handle dynamic content for 200K daily unique IPs. PHP may end up with just 100K and servlet ends up at around 50K.
However, even the old CGI can handle 20K unique IPs with a new CPU. Since most sites won't need to go above 20K IPs, this advantage is not that attractive in practice.
And what is worse is that the current existing mod_perl toolkits seem not scalable when compared to PHP. I knew 2 cases where people gave up the mod_perl toolkit and turned to PHP.
4) easy to manage, work as team
both mod_perl and servlet are good to be written in OO (and the so-called MVC). PHP is bad.
But again, majority webmasters don't need OO or MVC.
5) learning curve, friendly environment, existing applications etc.
PHP is the best, then serverlet; mod_perl is the worst.
This part I don't get. When I ask a semi advanced question on a PHP list I get a lot of just stupid responses or dead air. Biggest in this case is certainly not best. On the mod_perl list I pretty much end up feeling stupid for asking the question, because the answer comes so quickly and is so simple :)
Based on the above situation, we see that the potential mod_perl users are those who are using or will choose Java servlet, and advanced PHP users who need the projects to be in OO and MVC.
To advocate mod_perl, the priorities rank as: 1) focus on mod_perl's ability of OO / MVC 2) scalability (only the original mod_perl, not toolkits) 3) and speed 4) avoid toolkits but diretly go to XHTML.
POD MERL
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