Hi, At 02:14 PM 4/12/2002 -0700, drieux wrote: > >volks, > >I am new to the list - and have not had as much time to do >the background reading as I would prefer - so I thought if >there were some guidance to a person who knows how to programme >in perl - why I would want to support p5ee over j2ee/jini or >go with .Net
I believe Java's promise of "write once, run anywhere" is actually better fulfilled by Perl. And Perl6/Parrot are to dynamic languages what the .Net CLR is for static languages. (See http://www.parrotcode.org/faq/.) I looked around at the state of various cross-platform application runtime environments, and saw that the most pervasive execution environments, available across many platforms were: Perl (on servers), Java (on servers and browsers), and Javascript (on browsers). Each of these technologies holds the promise, to some varying degree, of "write once, run anywhere". ".Net" was not yet on the scene, but even when it arrived, the promise of proper cross-platform support for .Net was a long way off and altogether uncertain. I could have thrown my energies behind Java, but I prefer to program in Perl. (Simple as that.) And Perl has excellent support even for unprivileged accounts at ISP's, whereas Servlet support is hard to come by unless you own the machine (or you go to a very specialized ISP). Also, Perl offers several ways to do web applications: CGI for unprivileged, quick and dirty implementations, and mod_perl for high performance implementations when you have full control over the web server (also PerlEx, FastCGI, etc.). If you have a desire to program in Java and you like the API's that Sun (and others) have created, you should probably focus on Java. I think that things could be a lot simpler (or maybe higher level) than the J2EE specifies them. I have used a variety of tools on CPAN, and I have reinvented the wheel many times as I developed web (and other) applications and while I searched for the right framework. It seemed to me that the one thing that Perl was lacking was a blueprint for large-scale development and deployment of high-performance, high-availability systems (i.e. enterprise systems) along with guides of discipline for coding and documentation. Eventually, I decided to give a go at P5EE to create the framework I was searching for... one that made difficult things simple and almost impossible things attainable. > a) maintenance of the software Hard to say at this point. > b) performance of the software My first priority is to get it work the way I think it should work (while keeping an eye on the ability to tune for performance). Then it's a matter of doing the tuning. One thing I know is that Perl has always been fast. (You never had to "wait for the next version of Perl" before the performance would be decent.) And mod_perl is among the technology leaders in the web software performance race. So that's my explanation of "why". Stephen P.S. For an explanation of "why not?" you might consider that it is still largely vaporware.
