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E-commerce with mod_perl and Apache

Posted by michael on from the camel-power dept.

rob_99 writes: "Cool new mod_perl article at perl.com documents building a large scale ecommerce solution w/ mod_perl & apache!" Pretty cool stuff - it's kind of funny to think how ephemeral their work turned out to be.

4 of 174 comments (clear)

  1. Re:PERL - the "Write-Only" language... by jc42 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No; I haven't had that problem at all. Perl is a
    good language for writing understandable code.

    I was recently contacted by some people about a
    web site full of cgi scripts that I wrote several
    years ago. They sorta apoligized for not getting
    back in touch, explaining that the code was so easy
    to understand and modify that they just did it and
    didn't need to contact me. But now they had some
    more sophisticated needs that they weren't sure they
    could program, so they thought they'd call back an
    expert.

    So maybe the lesson here is that I should learn to
    write less readable code. Then people won't be able
    to modify it themselves, and they'll have to hire
    me to make trivial changes.

    --
    Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
  2. Servlet container maybe... but application server? by mke · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Perl certainly does a lot, and it is probably overlooked unfairly for a lot of web applications. As the authors illustrate, it makes a damn fine servlet container.

    But an application server it is not. Container managed persistance, transactional support, message queues, naming and lookup services? Integration with existing business objects and processes? These aren't trivial in Perl, but they are the core functionality of app servers. They pulled off clustering for eToys, but it was hardly an out of the box solution.

    If all you want is a servlet container, don't spend the money on an application server. Tomcat works great and iPlanet bundles one with their web server.

  3. Perl has a strong nice -- more than you think by spRed · · Score: 5, Interesting

    C++ guy who did industrial OO perl for two years --

    [quick disclaimer, feel free to use ruby or php for a substitute for perl below]

    Perl is very good for a much larger range of projects than you think. [with a HUGE deference to C++/OO people, see note at bottom]. Very few sites rely on pure computational power. Most sites only need a small compenent to be fast, and that you can implement in the language of you choice with perl bindings. The majority of your site is glue -- and this is what perl does well.

    I worked for a small team (5 developers) that wrote 200k lines of perl in a year and a half. That represents a far larger body of code if it had been written in another language. That isn't to say you lose control by using perl. You get to ignore the details, and in the bargain get a perfect language (and some extra time) to write regression tests.

    All in all, unless you are a games site that cares about milliseconds, you can get a page out the door in under .15 seconds with perl. The images loading (even on broadband) will be the gating factor on pageloads.

    -spRed

    the deference to OO folk, you can teach people who only know C++/Java perl, you can't teach people who only know perl the others. The reason why is that real CS educations are portable. Perl [and other interpreted languages] are looked down upon by CS folk - so only non-CS folk will persue perl as a primary language. Perl is, however, extremely useful for whatever you are doing (95% of you). Give it a chance, it will save you alot of time in the long run.

    --
    .sig Karma out the wazoo, better to spend points elsewhere if this is above 2 or below 0
  4. Serious Scalability by rnicey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I part own an e-commerce company that's partly built with Apache/mod_perl/MySQL. We crank millions of dollars through those servers every week (porn still pays, what can you say ;-). The compile time of a script that pulls in libraries with 200k+ lines of code without mod_perl is several seconds. With, it's < 1sec. True we have/need 4GB RAM/server, but it does allow us to scale to whatever we want.

    I often read articles saying perl/mysql can't handle enterprise solutions. Well, it can, does and is doing so in our case. Like any tool, it's as effective as the people wielding it.
    We also have a huge codebase in C/C++, Java, Python and a few others. There's even a few NT boxes thrown in for dealing with some obscure hardware. I'm not particularly bias one way or the other, I just need the results.

    By the by, I do have one solution for ensuring my programmers don't take sloppy shortcuts and write obviously quick and dirty code. It's the pink slip method. I find it works equally well in any language ;-)

    Robert Nice
    WebsiteBilling.com Inc.