Comment CGI and other solutions (Score 1) 432
Do people actually use CGI these days? I've been a professional web developer for four or so years, and it seems to me, at least, that traditional CGI scripting is pretty much dying off if you don't count small scripts people create for their homepages and such.
I used to do Perl and CGI's but that came to an end (except in some projects where I have to build on an old code base) over a year ago; these days, Java servlets and application servers, PHP, ColdFusion, StoryServer, Zope etc are pretty much the tools that I see being used (on Unix side of things, I'm not well-informed about the things NT developers use these days.) It all comes down to three things: ease of development, ease of maintenance and performance.
Perl is a quick language to develop small hacks in, but larger scale projects are a different story. An old-fashioned CGI is just way too slow for pretty much anything; I'm not sure about the performance of mod_perl vs. servlets, though. For ease of development, developing scripts from ground up can't compete with a nice application server where you can count on the product to handle DB connections, persistence etc for you.
And for smaller projects, products such as PHP and ColdFusion offer in many cases an even shorter development time than Perl.
Of course, YMMV; my views might be somewhat colored by my rather intense dislike of Perl (mind you, I hate Java too, and that is my primary development language these days :-))
// Juri
I used to do Perl and CGI's but that came to an end (except in some projects where I have to build on an old code base) over a year ago; these days, Java servlets and application servers, PHP, ColdFusion, StoryServer, Zope etc are pretty much the tools that I see being used (on Unix side of things, I'm not well-informed about the things NT developers use these days.) It all comes down to three things: ease of development, ease of maintenance and performance.
Perl is a quick language to develop small hacks in, but larger scale projects are a different story. An old-fashioned CGI is just way too slow for pretty much anything; I'm not sure about the performance of mod_perl vs. servlets, though. For ease of development, developing scripts from ground up can't compete with a nice application server where you can count on the product to handle DB connections, persistence etc for you.
And for smaller projects, products such as PHP and ColdFusion offer in many cases an even shorter development time than Perl.
Of course, YMMV; my views might be somewhat colored by my rather intense dislike of Perl (mind you, I hate Java too, and that is my primary development language these days
// Juri
