E-commerce with mod_perl and Apache

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.

Comments

Perl has a strong nice -- more than you think

[spRed]

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.