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Re: CGI/Perl vs. Middleware
Fellow www-rdb people,
> An interesting perspective, but in reality custom-built CGI will never go
> away. Like assembler routines, there are some situations that require
> low-level design.
> > My opinion is that CGI/Perl is "old school" and that the future of client/server www functionality is clearly based on in-process middleware
> > solutions.
My $0.02:
I use Perl for database access. But I am talking about Perl 5 using
the excellent libraries provided by the CPAN (see www.perl.com what
this means).
Not true: Perl is low level
Perl 4 is mostly hacking. Perl 5 can be very structured, as it is
100% object oriented. You have libraries, objects, inheritage and
all that fancy stuff. If you use it, Perl turns out to be quite
high vevel.
Not true: Perl is for custum bilt CGI only
In CPAN you find the DBI (Database Interface) which is a abstract
interface to RDBM. There are DBD (drivers) for almost any well
known database (including Oracle, Informix, mSQL, IBM-DB and other).
You can program absolutely vendor independent. So it makes sense
to build complex solutions that last in time. Even if you change
your vendor.
True: Perl has better environment than middleware
Also on CPAN are many libraries that enourmously ease CGI/HTML
programming. I think of libwww, libnet and CGI.pm. This way it
is possible to write a CGI script with no knowledge of HTML
(use the abstract methods in libwww's HTML::* or CGI's form
interface) or http/1.x protocol coded into your application.
That's what I call long lived software.
Not true: Perl CGI is slow
There are several efforts to speed up the CGI process. I think
of fastcgi and the perl/apache coupling. So CGI is slow in general,
but especially for Perl there are those two fastr ways. In the combination
Apache/Perl there is even the possibility to run a daemon like
CGI script that holds a persisten connection to your DB (best using
DBI) and have your Perl in a non-busy waiting loop that accepts
connections. No forking anymore.
Summary: If you make use of Perl 5 in ways of OOP and reuse of
public avaliable libraries, I consider Perl a solid basis for
quality database/web interfaces.
CU,
im
--
Campus: Ingo.Macherius@tu-clausthal.de http://www.tu-clausthal.de/~inim
Siemens: Ingo.Macherius@mwe.hvr.scn.de http://www.scn.de/~inim
information != knowledge != wisdom != truth != beauty != music == best (FZ)
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