Comment From a sysadmin's perspective.... (Score 1) 235
From the perspective of a sysadmin, the roxen/pike combo leave lots to be desired. I was recently working for a company that did its entire web hosting business with pike and roxen, and I was not impressed with the stability of the roxen web server. The roxen process apparently dies at odd intervals (much like older versions of CERN httpd), and so requires a 'start' script to be running in order to restart it when this happens.
Another big complaint is the fact that there is no mod_perl equivalent for roxen. At the company I was working for, we had several users who ran their own perl programs, and because roxen could not instantiate a perl vm (like apache does with mod_perl) it had to start a perl process to execute that program. For those of you who did lots of perl stuff before mod_perl came along, you know how bad this is.
But the argument from the roxen/pike advocates is to tell people to write their code in pike. But it's not that simple. Some people have perl scripts that work just fine...why should they have to convert them?
I've also had some experience with the way pike handles regular expressions. Perl's RE engine is *much* faster than pike's. If you're doing text processing or pattern recognition, Perl is the way to go.
I suppose I've gotten spoiled with not having to declare variables in Perl...if you need a variable, you just declare it right there. Not so in pike. It requires explicit declarations at the beginning of the function (be it main, or whatever). Java forces you to do this also, but at least it allows you to declare the variables wherever you need to.
All in all, I'm still not sold on the combo. My current employer uses apache/mod_perl and perl with some in-house apache modules written in C, all running on linux. I have not seen a more stable setup. It just works.
Perhaps pike and roxen will mature and be a viable solution in the near term. But I would not stake a business on a non-mainstream technology. The simple reason for this is that there aren't very many people to answer your questions. But pike is fun to play with, and roxen does some really neat things....things that could be integrated into apache with modules, but just haven't been yet.
Enough of my rambling. Did I mention this is my FIRST POST?
mp3.com - s/revolt/revolution/g
Another big complaint is the fact that there is no mod_perl equivalent for roxen. At the company I was working for, we had several users who ran their own perl programs, and because roxen could not instantiate a perl vm (like apache does with mod_perl) it had to start a perl process to execute that program. For those of you who did lots of perl stuff before mod_perl came along, you know how bad this is.
But the argument from the roxen/pike advocates is to tell people to write their code in pike. But it's not that simple. Some people have perl scripts that work just fine...why should they have to convert them?
I've also had some experience with the way pike handles regular expressions. Perl's RE engine is *much* faster than pike's. If you're doing text processing or pattern recognition, Perl is the way to go.
I suppose I've gotten spoiled with not having to declare variables in Perl...if you need a variable, you just declare it right there. Not so in pike. It requires explicit declarations at the beginning of the function (be it main, or whatever). Java forces you to do this also, but at least it allows you to declare the variables wherever you need to.
All in all, I'm still not sold on the combo. My current employer uses apache/mod_perl and perl with some in-house apache modules written in C, all running on linux. I have not seen a more stable setup. It just works.
Perhaps pike and roxen will mature and be a viable solution in the near term. But I would not stake a business on a non-mainstream technology. The simple reason for this is that there aren't very many people to answer your questions. But pike is fun to play with, and roxen does some really neat things....things that could be integrated into apache with modules, but just haven't been yet.
Enough of my rambling. Did I mention this is my FIRST POST?
mp3.com - s/revolt/revolution/g
