Re: suggestions for perl as web development language [EXT]

On 04.08.2020 22:48, Mark Blackman wrote:
[...]
> the web server handles all the complicated host or path rewrites and access control and 
> the Perl app focuses on responding to the, now-sanitised, fully normalized, HTTP requests.

I'll agree to that, up to a point.

If you just want to write web applications which run in a sanitized, normalised HTTP 
environment, then there are plenty of tools available, and your best choice nowadays may 
not be perl as a development language.
(*)

Now in the real world, you may often have to do things which do NOT fit in such a 
sanitized and normalized environment, and the simplest and most efficient way to do them 
may be at the level of the HTTP server itself. And if you are in such a case, and if your 
webserver is Apache httpd, then for such things mod_perl has no equivalent (except if you 
are very good at writing Apache httpd extensions in C).

And in my experience - although I don't know if this is an advantage or an inconvenient in 
a general sense - once you start using mod_perl to resolve such issues, you will be 
learning a lot about how Apache httpd works, and how mod_perl fits in it, and you will 
start finding out how many of these apparently thorny issues /can/ be handled at the 
Apache httpd and mod_perl level, and you will probably never want to go back to work with 
another webserver and another scripting language for it.
So be careful : Apache httpd + mod_perl are addictive.


(*) Although if you pick another language, then you would also lose the advantage of the 
perl CPAN library which has, *in one place*, something for just about everything you may 
ever want to do - including very good documentation on just about everything you may ever 
want to do).
If you don't know CPAN, and you do not understand why I'm insisting on it, do the 
following experience :
- go to https://metacpan.org/
- in the search box, type a word related to some programming issue which you are currently 
having (**)
- then read the descriptions and click on some module which looks interesting for you

In terms of programming, this is as close to Wikipedia as one can get.
Thanks to the hundreds of authors who contributed there over the year, and to their 
general care about good documentation.
For me, that alone is already enough justification for using perl.

(**) suggestions, of the top of my head : "covid", "usa", "png", "soap", "ldap", 
"calculus", "spanish", "mail", "smtp", "ebay", "dictionary", .. have fun.