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)

Received on Thursday, 19 September 1996 07:24:02 UTC