André Warnier wrote:
The responses there are indeed a bit scary. It feels like we're a dying
breed.
I believe this is to a large extent a "marketing issue" for perl in
general, and mod_perl by extension, with regard to the younger
programmers generation. At least in various European countries I know,
perl is not really being taught in programming schools as a "serious"
programming language for applications. These young people have all heard
the name, but seem to consider it as a powerful but somewhat messy
scripting language to create system administration scripts.
I am personally doing my best to introduce these newbies to the beauties
of perl and mod_perl, but it feels rather lonely sometimes.
Java and PHP seem definitely more popular, or better-known.
I agree that this does echo perl's problems in general, but mod_perl has
a long history of not really being very good at marketing itself. I
know Perrin and some other people did try at the launch of mod_perl2,
but that effort (and the associated mailing list) has long since dried up.
- A surprising number of people are running mod_perl under the worker
MPM.
What is so surprising about this ? (genuine curious question)
It's surprising to me, and probably to Torsten, because the perceived
common wisdom is to run prefork, because worker may or may not be as
well tested, and has all the bonus issues related to thread-safeness.
- the documentation could use some work. Specifically more tutorial /
intro kind of stuff.
Agreed. There is a definite need also for something like a new mod_perl
Guide and Cookbook all-in-one, updated for mod_perl 2 and with a section
about the framework/template systems mentioned above. Written in a style
meant to show that these are not old-fashioned technologies only
practised by oldies like me (us?).
What I mean is that to cover all one needs to know to create some
serious web applications in Java, you'd need at least 6 thick volumes,
while for Perl 800-1000 pages would be more than enough.
O'Reilly, where are you ?
Honestly, I think this stuff is currently better handled by the
community. As such, i'm going to take a stab at writing some very basic
intro / tutorial kind of documentation to be added to perl.apache.org.
When i started with mod_perl 1, the Guide on thought the "guide"
perl.apache.org was amazing, but it seems to me that mod_perl 2 doesn't
have that in the same way. Much of the content has been ported over to
the 2.0 section, but there are many pages that haven't been updated from
the 1.0 tree at all.
Adam
