On Fri, 14 Jan 2000, Barb and Tim wrote:
> It could really enhance your integrity if you also
> presented honest evaluations of the downsides of Perl.
> The promotion of Perl on this site is so ubiquitous and
> one sided, and Perl has such a bad reputation in many ways,
> that somebody like me has a hard time swallowing the sunny
> prognostications and finally diving in, unless I see
> full honesty. The language itself is hard enough to swallow.
> Just a suggestion.
I would venture to suggest that the problems of mod_perl are as follows:
- Non-trivial to build and install (judging by the number of questions here
regarding problems in this area - not by personal experience).
- Still some wierd bugs.
- A number of special considerations have to be made when building your
program, such as taking care of persistent variables, etc.
- All of perl's irritations (and there are quite a few - like the
definition of truth).
- Documentation still isn't fantastic - although the guide has made great
inroads into changing that, and the book is awsome.
- Some modules are still a bit cryptic (e.g. some people expect things like
Apache::Session to do everything for them, whereas it's really a
session management toolkit).
- mod_perl is still really in its infancy, and hasn't taken off as fast as
other systems such as php and Zope. I think this is due to the complexity
issues outlined above, and the fact that ISP's don't like mod_perl.
- Oh yeah - and mod_perl uses lots of RAM. That's probably the main reason
ISP's don't like it.
--
<Matt/>
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