Matthew Kennedy wrote: > On Mon, 2001-10-22 at 21:27, Perrin Harkins wrote: > >>It sounds like the limitation there is that you're interfacing with systems >>that can't notify you when something new happens. That's not Perl's fault. >>If you wrote your daemons in Java alpahabet soup, they'd still have to poll >>the pop3 server. >> > > Well, I'd more likely be using a standard javamail API within the > context of a EJB server. There is a fairly rich set of call backs there > which mean I generally don't have to poll/sleep etc. Also true of the > java message service.
I suppose the Java stuff does make it more obvious how to do that kind of thing. There are dozens of ways to have some perl code execute every time a message arrives at a mail server without polling (Mail::Filter, procmail, Perl pop3 server, maybe PerlMX, etc.), but there isn't any One True Perl Mail API. Pointing newbies in the right direction is the strength of standardized APIs, and it does seem to have helped Java gain acceptance. There are commercial JMS implementations that simply poll database tables, but most people don't seem to mind as long as that's all hidden behind the standard JMS API. So, maybe a version in Perl would be a useful thing. - Perrin
