VBScript vs. Perl Web Development Time Comparisons?

An Anonymous Coward with thoughts of rapid CGI deployment, asks: "My manager has asked me for something that would show the differences in development time between ASP/VBScript and CGI/Perl. He is trying to gauge time schedules for web projects, but I don't have a clue as to where such information would be documented. I am familiar with both architectures and know the differences, but I think he's hoping for white papers of comparisons. Can anyone tell me where to look?"

Comments

your looking in the wrong place..

[Anonymous Coward]

my place of work did this a while ago.. we tested the deployment time of a medium size project.

We tested ASP/VB, Perl, PHP and Java.

we found the fastest to implement, and the one that successfuly did what we want, had the best stability and fastest processing was PHP4, with the zend optimizer (For extra speed).

The buety of php is its so flexible. We were able to have numerous programmers, each with hugely different techniques, using it. It can be either fully OO, or function based, or a mixture of the two. This allowed for massive cuts in implementation time.

Re:Depends on the people and project

[Black Perl]

I agree that it depends on people and project.

I've been in two situations where we had two separate developers, a VB and a Perl developer, work on the exact same project in the interest of getting it done as quickly as possible. (Disclosure: I was the Perl developer :-)

Perl won, by a longshot. Both in time and in size. But I can't take complete credit. Thanks to CPAN, everything you've ever wanted to do has been made into a module. All you have to do is load the module, initiate some objects, call a few methods, and you're done! Not that I tell the VB developers that. :-)

In a word . . . Perl

[Camel Pilot]

Perl has _much_ faster development cycle then VBscript/ASP and is a better overall development environment for web based applications for the following reasons.

1. CPAN - Hundreds of reusable software components such as CGI(cgi tools), Storeable(data marshalling), LWP(web client), Template(seperate logic from presentation), DBI(DB abstraction), etc.

2. Perl has higher level functionality builtin and is efficient at handling text. Ask your VBscript programmer to show you the equivalent code for these common operations:

String interpolation
$str = "The time is $time $timezone $date"

Pattern Matching
# Find and replace in strings
$illiad_book = s/Hector/Gates/g

# Remove duplicate words from input
$input_text = s/\b(\w+) \1\b/$1/gi ;

Array manipulations
# Sort an array in reverse numerically
@sort_reverse_lst = sort { $b $a } @lst ;

# Filter directory listing for text files
@dir_txt_lst = grep /\.txt/ @dir_lst ;

# Break up text into sentences
@sentences = split /\./ , $long_speach;

# reverse operation
$long_speach = join "." , @sentences ;

Symbolic references
$var = "temperature";
$$var = 72.1 ;

print "$var = $temperature"; # Prints temperature = 72.1

3. Perl is portable, even more so then Java. Apache or IIS; Win32 or palm.

4. Start off with cgi and if you need speed later port to mod_perl(Unix) or perlex(activestate win32).

5. Can be used to extend Apache via mod_perl.

There is more but that should be enough.