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Help Test mod_perl 2 Release Candidates
stas writes "After almost 3 years of work mod_perl 2 is almost ready for its 2.0.0 release. We plan to make the gold release in a few weeks. Please help to test the release candidates by starting to port your mod_perl 1 applications to mod_perl 2. Make sure to read the documentation and report
any problems that you may have discovered. Thanks."
Well, there is of course slashcode, and Amazon.com also uses mod_perl and HTML::Mason (see http://www.masonhq.com/?AmazonDotCom/). I'm sure there are many others as well.
It's not really fair to equate mod_perl to per-page interpreted languages.
mod_perl, and to a certain extent Java servlets, gives you a huge amount of power over the web serving process, and are suitable for developing web applications that can do almost anything with HTTP.
PHP, ASP and the like give you a per-page interpreted language, oriented to producing one page of HTML at a time. They are much easier to get started with, and they're the "right" choice for most websites.
Of course middle-men between the two camps exist: Servlets have JSPs, for example, which obey a per-page paradigm but are run by servlets. There are also third-party templating system with greater or lesser degrees of flexibility/depth/power (Tapestry is a particularly impressive one.) My own website (http://n3dst4.com , rather than the one in my profile) is written in Mason, which is an interpreted component and template layer on top of mod_perl. Because of the depth of control that mod_perl has, Mason can do some things that PHP can't, like having a completely programmable request handler, global or per-directory pre-handlers, a seamless component model).
I'm not dissing PHP, though. The site in my profile (Sacred Steel) is written in PHP, because it was the right tool for that job.
Oh, and remember that .net and J2EE are allegedly complete enterprise programming platforms, while mod_perl is just one specific technology for web application programming.