Comment Re:Authors other books... (Score 2, Insightful) 244
Who uses Perl in web programming anymore?
We use it at my company for the vast majority of our web programming tasks, and it works very well for us. Reasons I personally like it:-
* Contorl. While PHP may do a lot more for you (e.g. form parsing), there have certainly been issues related to how it did things. In Perl you can do it as you want. If you put this in a module, as we did, then Perl is no more work than PHP beyond that one-off cost.
* I find the Perl database access model preferable to PHP. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of people end up writing database classes to encapsulate the mysql_whatever or pgsql_whatever methods. In Perl it's OO from the start. Furthermore, if you change from using one database server to another, you only have to make the change in the connection string, and not to a load of function calls.
* Perl puts pattern matching tools right into your hands - it has an operator (//) specially for pattern matching. A lot of the security issues I see in web development come from improper validation. Pattern matching is a powerful tool for writing validation and Perl makes it easier to do than other languages I've seen.
* CPAN. Perl has modules for a wide range of things. Need to look at the headers of uploaded MP3 sound clips to check they were encoded properly? We found a module on CPAN to do this within minutes. CPAN is an amazing resource.
Just my few thoughts on why I belive Perl isn't dead for web programming by any means. :-)
Jonathan
We use it at my company for the vast majority of our web programming tasks, and it works very well for us. Reasons I personally like it:-
* Contorl. While PHP may do a lot more for you (e.g. form parsing), there have certainly been issues related to how it did things. In Perl you can do it as you want. If you put this in a module, as we did, then Perl is no more work than PHP beyond that one-off cost.
* I find the Perl database access model preferable to PHP. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that a lot of people end up writing database classes to encapsulate the mysql_whatever or pgsql_whatever methods. In Perl it's OO from the start. Furthermore, if you change from using one database server to another, you only have to make the change in the connection string, and not to a load of function calls.
* Perl puts pattern matching tools right into your hands - it has an operator (//) specially for pattern matching. A lot of the security issues I see in web development come from improper validation. Pattern matching is a powerful tool for writing validation and Perl makes it easier to do than other languages I've seen.
* CPAN. Perl has modules for a wide range of things. Need to look at the headers of uploaded MP3 sound clips to check they were encoded properly? We found a module on CPAN to do this within minutes. CPAN is an amazing resource.
Just my few thoughts on why I belive Perl isn't dead for web programming by any means.
Jonathan
