Posted by
CowboyNeal
on from the rubbish-listers dept.
JamesD_UK writes "mod_perl 2.0.0 has been officially released into CPAN. Enhancements over mod_perl 1 include threads support and a perl interface to the Apache Portable Runtime. More details on the release can be found on CPAN."
Re:Perl still used?
by
Living+WTF
·
· Score: 5, Informative
> Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
What do you think that ".pl" in most slashdot URLs stands for? PHP Light? Phyton Lowspeed? Perhaps Lisp?
-- I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
General note: what is it?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Informative
For people who are wondering what mod_perl is exactly: it's a way of integrating perl into Apache's webserver. I think the main advantage is that you don't have the overhead of firing up perl for each cgi-type request. The main gotchas, for the developers point of view, involve a little perl enviornment staying alive, when a perl script starts, runs, and stops, it cleans up after itself, but when it 'stays alive' inside apache, you have to make sure it's not accumulating too much memory cruft, that you're closing handles, etc etc.
This is what I know mostly by reputation, rather than direct experience, experts please feel free to correct me
Re:General note: what is it?
by
ydnar
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The main advantage is not the faster CGI execution environment.
mod_perl lets you create Apache modules in Perl, that handle every stage of a request (or anything else), and are full peers of Apache modules written in C.
ModPerl::Registry[Prefork] is just a bonus. The more interesting m_p modules are authn/authz/dispatch modules that can replace cumbersome C equivalents.
sure. Some of us just *gasp* continue to use Perl 5. Amazing isn't it?
Re:Perl still used?
by
_defiant_
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
Ohh, I don't know... how about Amazon and Salon? Kuro5hin and all the other Scoop based sites like DailyKos and MyDD. And now that I think about it, MovableType, TypePad, and LiveJournal are all writen in Perl.
Everyone bitchin' that "CGI is dead" should broaden their horizons a bit. CGI may be stupid and dead, but Perl is used in a lot of different ways. It's still one the best languages for getting good work done.
For example, Mason is a pretty good tool for doing Perl-based web components.
So bitch about CGI if you wish, but that's not what Perl is for.
-- Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Re:Perl still used?
by
ajs
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Yeah, but is it mod_perl or cgi? If you're using fastcgi, is there still a big performance gain by switching to mod_perl?"
If you're still thinking in terms of CGI, then it's close to a wash.
However, mod_perl isn't about CGI. mod_perl is about exposing the Apache API to you. Want to build a caching system that doesn't require a single line of code to be executed for 90% of incoming requests? You can do that with mod_perl. Want to proxy some requests based on the protocol version the browser uses? mod_perl can do that long before you get to the point of even trying to find a cgi program on disk.
mod_perl lets you do far more than any lightly coupled tool can, and thus it is the building block upon which you build a real CMS (like bricolage) or other high-level Web tool (like TTK, which is what Slashdot uses).
Re:Perl still used?
by
abulafia
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to
offer the world's largest selection of products online.
for details.
AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld
devices.
DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest
providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.
Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.
Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.
Salon.com - Online magazine covering news,
politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web
awards.
Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.
A
AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.
Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software
Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.
American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.
Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.
arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.
astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.
Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.
Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer
Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.
bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.
BlackSpider - Managed services provider
focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.
Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.
C
cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.
Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.
-- I forget what 8 was for.
Some mod_perl info
by
programgeek
·
· Score: 5, Informative
You people are saying alot of stuff without even bothering to google it.
The following is taken from http://perl.apache.org/
"mod_perl is more than CGI scripting on steroids. It is a whole new way to create dynamic content by utilizing the full power of the Apache web server to create stateful sessions, customized user authentication systems, smart proxies and much more. Yet, magically, your old CGI scripts will continue to work and work very fast indeed. With mod_perl you give up nothing and gain so much!"
"mod_perl gives you a persistent Perl interpreter embedded in your web server. This lets you avoid the overhead of starting an external interpreter and avoids the penalty of Perl start-up time, giving you super-fast dynamic content.
As you'd expect from the Perl community, there are hundreds of modules written for mod_perl, everything from persistent database connections, to templating sytems, to complete XML content delivery systems. Web sites like Slashdot and Wired Magazine use mod_perl."
Yes, Slashdot does run on mod_perl.
A friend of mine uses mod_perl and the performance increase he gets is insane.
-- Georgia
Re:threads support
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Re:Perl a dead language?
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
> Whenever any of these JavaScript components makes any kind of call back to the database or web server, it must do so via CGI.
So all those java web apps use CGI, eh? Zope's powered by CGI on the backend as well? I could go on, but wow... I mean, your assertion is so patently untrue, I rather suspect you don't even know what CGI actually is.
Here is the list of the top level comments prior to yours that were modded down: 1) Never used it. What's the big deal? 2) FP 3) dead language. 4) offshoring myths 5) if the server is running it the slashdot effect will kill it. 6) Is there anyone left who hasn't switched to Ruby or Python? 7) Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
All were either totally OT, or obvious language-war trolls, save #1 which was wasn't a critical post.
AFAICT it looks like the moderation system is working quite well.
--
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
Re:mod_perl on Windows
by
jjn1056
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I build a REST interface for an audio generation system at "http://mp3.motorola.com.cn:8080/composer" which is mod_perl2 on windows server 2003 and perl 5.8.6. It just works, not trouble.
-- Peace, or Not?
Gotta love the .sig
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Chances are anyone that would blindly run perl from a.sig on Slashdot has already learned this the hard way:
Re:Perl a dead language?
by
Fnord
·
· Score: 2, Informative
For most of those cases, app servers have completely replaced CGI. The problem with CGI is lack of persistence, and process startup costs. These days, any decent web app is written with some persistent layer that interacts directly with the web server, and loads code snipets of its own language, starts objects, calls callback routines or something similar to handle requests. mod_perl, J2EE/JSP, PHP, Zope, and Ruby on Rails are all examples of this.
Re:Perl still used?
by
millette
·
· Score: 2, Informative
See also embperl if all you want is to embed perl (duh) in html, as you might do with php. That being said, you should separate the code and the layout, blah blah blah.
At my previous job we used mod_perl (1 and 2[beta]). The excellent part about mod_perl is that it allows you to completely control Apache in every manner possible.
There are excellent performance benefits in writing Apache handlers... and mod_perl simply allows them to be written in perl.
The last application I developed handled multi-millions of records per day without flinching. There were dozens of users and several extremely complex equations and correlations done...
In the end, it outperformed the other attempts made at doing the same thing... and it was simple to maintain.
Since my departure (and that of the rest of the perl team)... the company decided to scrap perl and move completely to java (for unix systems). They're finding that getting rid of the several million lines of perl code and the hundred-or-so websites developed in mod_perl is likely to take them an eternity when rewriting in java.
Though I now develop in ASP.NET (C#, etc)... I still fondly remember my days as a perl developer. Being able to crank out an application in little to no time was amazing... and with the power of CPAN it's hard to compare any other language.
Slashdot Mirror
> Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
What do you think that ".pl" in most slashdot URLs stands for? PHP Light? Phyton Lowspeed? Perhaps Lisp?
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.
For people who are wondering what mod_perl is exactly: it's a way of integrating perl into Apache's webserver. I think the main advantage is that you don't have the overhead of firing up perl for each cgi-type request. The main gotchas, for the developers point of view, involve a little perl enviornment staying alive, when a perl script starts, runs, and stops, it cleans up after itself, but when it 'stays alive' inside apache, you have to make sure it's not accumulating too much memory cruft, that you're closing handles, etc etc.
This is what I know mostly by reputation, rather than direct experience, experts please feel free to correct me
--
#perl -e '$??s:;s:s;;$?::s;;=]=>%-{-|}&|`{;; y; -/:-@[-`{-};`-{/" -;;s;;$_;see'
sure. Some of us just *gasp* continue to use Perl 5. Amazing isn't it?
Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
Ohh, I don't know... how about Amazon and Salon? Kuro5hin and all the other Scoop based sites like DailyKos and MyDD. And now that I think about it, MovableType, TypePad, and LiveJournal are all writen in Perl.
For example, Mason is a pretty good tool for doing Perl-based web components.
So bitch about CGI if you wish, but that's not what Perl is for.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
"Yeah, but is it mod_perl or cgi? If you're using fastcgi, is there still a big performance gain by switching to mod_perl?"
If you're still thinking in terms of CGI, then it's close to a wash.
However, mod_perl isn't about CGI. mod_perl is about exposing the Apache API to you. Want to build a caching system that doesn't require a single line of code to be executed for 90% of incoming requests? You can do that with mod_perl. Want to proxy some requests based on the protocol version the browser uses? mod_perl can do that long before you get to the point of even trying to find a cgi program on disk.
mod_perl lets you do far more than any lightly coupled tool can, and thus it is the building block upon which you build a real CMS (like bricolage) or other high-level Web tool (like TTK, which is what Slashdot uses).
Amazon.com - E-commerce pioneer seeking to offer the world's largest selection of products online. for details.
AvantGo - Mobile applications for handheld devices.
DynDNS.org - One of the world's largest providers of free and premium Dynamic DNS services.
Findory - Personalized news and blogs aggregator. Findory learns what kind of content you like by the pages you read.
Live365.com - The world's largest Internet radio website.
Salon.com - Online magazine covering news, politics, technology, art, sex and health; winner of numerous web awards.
Weta Digital - Weta Digital are well known as the special effects people behind the Lord of the Rings films. At his OSCON 2004 keynote, Milton Ngan of Weta Digital thanked some technologies, including Mason, which is used as part of their intranet.
A
AcuTrans.net - Home page for AcuTrans, a company providing an online content management system integrated with transcription services (built with Mason) for business, legal, medical, and self-insured companies.
Adventist.org - The official web site of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.
Alhazred - Progressive music project being produced with open source/free software
Alzabo.org - Home page for Alzabo data modelling tool.
American Lung Association of Washington - Assuring lung health for the people of Washington state through research, education, community service and advocacy.
Apartments - Apartments for rent by RentersInc.com. Free apartment search engine and apartment guide.
arabellan - Web presence of Ryan "Exide Arabellan" Zander, a graphical artist.
astrojax.com - amazing fun and action game - community website with lots of features.
Autismeinfocentrum.nl - Information- and documentationcentre about autism and related subjects in the Netherlands.
AutoSupplyUK.com - Used Japanese import auto store.
B BDO - Austrian tax consultancy
Beotechnic - Company specializing in knowhow transfer
Bikeworld.com - Online retailer, sporting a new 100% Mason-powered site that was developed entirely in-house.
bizjournals.com - Publisher of 41 weekly business newspapers across the US.
BlackSpider - Managed services provider focused exclusively on the provision of e-mail security solutions.
Burma-Shave.org - All of the original Burma-Shave jingles, plus the Burma-Shave Daily mailing list.
C
cibera.de - cibera is an online library site which offers a central access point to interdisciplinary material concerning the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking area as well as the Caribbean.
Cars - iCarsInc.com Cars for sale. Buy and sell new and used cars online. Your next auto purchase starts right here. Find new, used, classics, sports cars, luxury cars, trucks, SUVï½s and even motorcycles for sale.
I forget what 8 was for.
The following is taken from http://perl.apache.org/
"mod_perl is more than CGI scripting on steroids. It is a whole new way to create dynamic content by utilizing the full power of the Apache web server to create stateful sessions, customized user authentication systems, smart proxies and much more. Yet, magically, your old CGI scripts will continue to work and work very fast indeed. With mod_perl you give up nothing and gain so much!"
"mod_perl gives you a persistent Perl interpreter embedded in your web server. This lets you avoid the overhead of starting an external interpreter and avoids the penalty of Perl start-up time, giving you super-fast dynamic content.
As you'd expect from the Perl community, there are hundreds of modules written for mod_perl, everything from persistent database connections, to templating sytems, to complete XML content delivery systems. Web sites like Slashdot and Wired Magazine use mod_perl."
Yes, Slashdot does run on mod_perl.
A friend of mine uses mod_perl and the performance increase he gets is insane.
Georgia
It is revamped!!
/ user/intro/overview.pod#Threads_Support
http://search.cpan.org/~gozer/mod_perl-2.0.0/docs
> Whenever any of these JavaScript components makes any kind of call back to the database or web server, it must do so via CGI.
... I mean, your assertion is so patently untrue, I rather suspect you don't even know what CGI actually is.
So all those java web apps use CGI, eh? Zope's powered by CGI on the backend as well? I could go on, but wow
Here is the list of the top level comments prior to yours that were modded down:
1) Never used it. What's the big deal?
2) FP
3) dead language.
4) offshoring myths
5) if the server is running it the slashdot effect will kill it.
6) Is there anyone left who hasn't switched to Ruby or Python?
7) Who still uses Perl for web stuff?
All were either totally OT, or obvious language-war trolls, save #1 which was wasn't a critical post.
AFAICT it looks like the moderation system is working quite well.
Hyperbole is the worst thing ever.
I build a REST interface for an audio generation system at "http://mp3.motorola.com.cn:8080/composer" which is mod_perl2 on windows server 2003 and perl 5.8.6. It just works, not trouble.
Peace, or Not?
Chances are anyone that would blindly run perl from a .sig on Slashdot has already learned this the hard way:
http://www.dlitz.net/stuff/malicious-perl-sig/
For most of those cases, app servers have completely replaced CGI. The problem with CGI is lack of persistence, and process startup costs. These days, any decent web app is written with some persistent layer that interacts directly with the web server, and loads code snipets of its own language, starts objects, calls callback routines or something similar to handle requests. mod_perl, J2EE/JSP, PHP, Zope, and Ruby on Rails are all examples of this.
See also embperl if all you want is to embed perl (duh) in html, as you might do with php. That being said, you should separate the code and the layout, blah blah blah.
At my previous job we used mod_perl (1 and 2[beta]). The excellent part about mod_perl is that it allows you to completely control Apache in every manner possible.
There are excellent performance benefits in writing Apache handlers... and mod_perl simply allows them to be written in perl.
The last application I developed handled multi-millions of records per day without flinching. There were dozens of users and several extremely complex equations and correlations done...
In the end, it outperformed the other attempts made at doing the same thing... and it was simple to maintain.
Since my departure (and that of the rest of the perl team)... the company decided to scrap perl and move completely to java (for unix systems). They're finding that getting rid of the several million lines of perl code and the hundred-or-so websites developed in mod_perl is likely to take them an eternity when rewriting in java.
Though I now develop in ASP.NET (C#, etc)... I still fondly remember my days as a perl developer. Being able to crank out an application in little to no time was amazing... and with the power of CPAN it's hard to compare any other language.