On Wednesday, April 2, 2003, at 09:52 AM, Dan Muey wrote:
This is a cool thread. I'm glad everyone is staying so peaceful about
It. That's another thing I don't like about PHP is that if I was having
this discussion with a PHP person thet'd be insulting me for even considering
something else.
I think that sort of zealousness exists in many languages - Perl included. PHP has a much larger foothold in the web market than Perl, and has a shallower learning curve, so it has a large 'unwashed masses' factor at the bottom.
BTW, I am a 'PHP person' (I'm a core developer on the PHP project), and I run a company that does almost exclusively Perl programming for the web, using Apache:::ASP. So that's my spin and where I'm coming from.
If your wondering about reliability and stability and fuunctionality ::
Perl has been around a long time.
Yes. And Perl in general is much more mature. However if you are looking at HTML-embedding solutions (embperl, Apache::ASP, etc.), they are much less mature than Perl as a whole and thus Pelr in that domain is still a bit krufty.
Perl powers a huge part of the internet, networks, etc...
PHP has a much larger marketshare for web scripting though.
I even use it on my home computer to keep track of scheduling, data, email etc..
Perl has greater functionality than PHP.
I would personally agree with this, but this statement has high FUD value. It's about comfort level. There are many things that are easier to do in PHP than in Perl, and vice-versa. There aren't too many things I have needed to do that just couldnt be done in either of the languages.
If you want it to run like mod_php use mod_perl. Someone said that not
using mod_perl "increases dramatically the startup". Yeah by like zillionth of a second.
I agree this is bogus. You serve multiple requests per child, so the startup cost is amortized out. I should note that mod_php != mod_perl. They have distinct, non-overlapping feature sets. PHP is by original construction a templating language that allows embedding code directly in HTML pages. mod_perl by itself is no such beast, but is instead an embedded interpreter in apache, exposing all the apache module hooks via Perl (similar thing exists in PHP, but it's in beta).
To 'do what mod_php does', you need to run something on top of mod_perl, like embperl or Apache::ASP.
In fact if I run a plain old non mod_perl cgi and the some PHP thing, both doing the same
Exact thing, say parsing a form and emailing it to one person, Then I'd bet that
They were one of two things :: very close to each other in speed, or Perl would be faster.
Now add the mod_perl and all is well.
PHP and mod_perl benchmark out about the same by all accounts (Michael Radwin's slides re: choosing PHP for Yahoo! have some nice graphs).
Basically the realiability is the same on both. Does PHP do what you need? Who knows. Does Perl?
You bet you sweet mother it does and a lot more than you probably ever thought of.
More FUD. PHP certainly can do what you want to do. The question (IMHO) is what language are you most comfortable with. If you're starting from scratch, PHP is really hard to beat as a solution to the web problem. It's simple and intuitive and has a shallow learning curve. OTOH, if you already know Perl, and especially if you are building on a legacy code-base, Perl is a fine solution as well.
George
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