On Tue, 2002-07-30 at 21:03, Perrin Harkins wrote: > I hope you meant that as a joke. Fotango.com, where Leon works, has a > whole system built on web services in Perl: http://opensource.fotango.com/
This is a follow up on the advocacy side, but seems to tie-in a little better following this link. What is important about web services and Perl is the cross platform side of things. Whereas previously at Fotango our front end was written in Perl and our backoffice was a collection of Delphi applications, all sharing a database now our system is a set of Delphi and Perl front ends to a Web Services backend. It doesn't matter what the backend is written in. Of course you and I both know its written in Perl -- and I like that, which is why I work in a Perl shop -- however, there are lots of places that happen to like Java and J2EE. I know that other language bridges exist for Perl, but I've not found another language binding that works as consistently well to all the other languages that people feel the need to use. If there is, I'd like to hear about it. To me an 'enterprise system' is one that doesn't stop Bob in Accounting from slapping together a VB application to help out with the reporting if he wants to. While a database provides that sort of integration sooner or later Bob is going to want to update some number or another that has software around it on the other side of the office to make sure he's doing it correctly. When that goes wrong it costs organizations money three times - twice to develop the software and once to track the issue back to Bob's innocuous change. Without Web Services I can hand-on-heart say that we wouldn't be writing Perl at Fotango. 2 years ago when I joined Fotango we were trying to figure out how we could stay alive given that the dot Com market was going to collapse Real Soon Now. The solution was that Fotango stopped being just 'Your Online Photo Album'. It leveraged its existing internal skill set (Perl) to write Web Services, and become a software organization that also happened to sell cheap prints from your digital camera with its technology. Strategies like this are a gamble, but partly because of our backend technology we were acquired by Canon so one could say it has already paid off. The killer app of web services isn't that it gives you a '(grid|network) of services'. Its that places like Fotango can exist and still sell software written in Perl to those that drank the $other_language Kool Aid, and that makes me pretty happy. Regards, James. -- James A. Duncan Chief Scientist, Fotango.com http://opensource.fotango.com
