How prevalent is mod perl?

[wintermute]

I work with a small group of developers using Perl CGI to generate static/dynamic web pages. I'm looking for ways to speed up dbase access and page rendering in general. It looks like mod_perl would fit the bill nicely but I'm concerned it may be a little outdated. Anyone here have experience getting mod_perl to work with Apache 2? Were you satisfied with the performance? Thanks in advance.

W

[jdMorgan]

PERL outdated? As compared to what?

If you're judging it by comparison to PHP, then be aware that PHP was invented to solve a different problem beyond general server-side scripting. It was addressed to generating HTML pages (and similar) for delivery to clients. PERL, on the other hand, is more suited to "back-end" jobs that are not directly exposed to the client as is the case with HTML "page" generation.

If it's any indication, Apache 2 added Perl-Compatible Regular Expressions (PCRE) as a feature. So, I doubt that PERL is "going away" any time soon.

Jim

[wintermute]

Jim,
yeah we're pretty committed to Perl ourselves and that's the main reason I'm looking for ways to tweak the performance via Apache. I really like the potential to open a dbase handle and share it with other scripts, the ability to limit memory usage of processes and to even load balance across servers. There are some nice examples of the mod_perl web site but I just didn't seem to be turning much info up elsewhere.

[jdMorgan]

Welcome to the world of 'fads' -- Many folks are using the wrong language for applications simply because it's 'the latest thing' and for no other reason. A company I used to work for lost millions because some brilliant guy talked them into using object-oriented programming when it was *not* called for... The system ran, but very, very slowly, and was therefore unusable. We survived it, but profits weren't so good that year...

Now we've got newbies coding their Web sites in XML, because that's the 'new HTML,' right?

Recently-trained script coders are demonstrating the saying, "If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail" -- We get many questions from recently-minted JavaScript coders, trying to do something client-side using JS that can (or should, for security reasons) be done server-side. But all they know is JS...

PERL is a solid, mature scripting language, but don't expect too much in the way of exciting fan sites. CPAN is about it. We've gained dozens of high-level languages in the past 40 years, but sometimes FORTRAN is still the right answer... :)

Jim