Saturday September 18, 2004

Although Apache 2.0 has been out for a while now, the risk for mod_perl and PHP based developers is still high.

I just ran into an interview I did with Linux Guru about two years ago. I was relatively upbeat at the time 'cause I expected that the innovations in Apache 2.0 would be sufficiently compelling that it'd drive mod_perl and PHP developers to "get on the bus." Sadly, that hasn't happened.

If you're serving static content or need to wire up an external application server (i.e. Tomcat via mod_jk), then Apache 2.0 is definitely the way to go. But the vast body of mod_perl modules on CPAN that work well with 1.x but don't with 2.0 does not bode well. Thread safe Perl and PHP development is really the key to Apache 2.0's success within that development community, it seems like it'd behoove RedHat, IBM and other vendors who've bet a lot on the open source integration market to spur this development.

Wednesday September 15, 2004

I'm fan of expressing business logic cleanly separated from display logic. It becomes especially important for managing CRUD cycles within an application. In j2ee-land, MVC with struts is the de-facto standard for doing those things and it works pretty well. However, in land o' LAMP, no such standard exists.

I'm currently looking at using Maypole with HTML::Mason. But it looks like (oy!) TMTOWTDI decisions are to be made there:

• Maypole::View::Mason
• Maypole::View::Mason (collision detection!)
• MasonX::Maypole

Tuesday September 14, 2004

I keep hearing from mercenary recruiters from Amazon about technology jobs requiring mod_perl and HTML::Mason knowledge (I tell 'em "No Thanks But Say Hi To Jon For Me" -- I doubt they ever do) . Hearing that one of the topics of conversation at this year's OSCON was the demise of mod_perl came as quite a surprise.

According to the Journal of jjohn, mod_perl's problem is that it's a CGI enabler (psychobabblisticly: it allows web developers to indulge in Bad Things). jjohn sez...

Now, it's not that mod_perl suck (it doesn't) or that it's not useful in some situations (it is), is just that MOST PEOPLE ARE SIMPLY DOING CGI CRAP. That's right, stupid CGI + HTML is a kind of universal Microsoft Fundation Class that works for programmers of all languages.

PHP is a terrible language. Perl has long suffered with the albatross of its highly syncretic origin and it's "organic design". However, PHP is a lot worse. It's a kitchen-sink language where crazy things like mysql routines and GD libraries are part of the core language. While objects were around in PHP 4, few PHP systems use OO style. To put a fine point on it, most of the PHP apps I've looked at are poorly written and a bear to debug.

And yet, PHP is frequently a better choice than Perl for web apps.

Besides the close association to the CGI aspersion, the big problem that Perl and mod_perl suffer from is that it's too damn easy to build templating web component frameworks. HTML::Mason, HTML::Embperl, Template Toolkit, HTML::Template, Apache::ASP and so on and so forth ("but wait! there's more..."). How many goddamned many of these do we need? The overlapping similar-but-different functionality borders on Not Invented Here neuroses. And so at a certain point, TMTOWTDI is a liability. As a programming language, PHP suffers from a similar TMTOWTDI blight. For instance, for file path values, there's pathinfo but there's also dirname and basename, which are completely redundant.

So if you're going to use a language and component system that sucks (and they all do), perhaps the thing to do is to use the one that sucks the least. Despite the OO additions to PHP language for PHP 5 (notably absent: real exceptions), it's a tough case to make that PHP sucks less than mod_perl. Maybe the PEAR libraries and the Smarty component system make it a little more usable. Maybe. Perhaps mod_perl's maturity and Perl's general usefulness inside and outside of the web environment is an enduring asset. But I'm not convinced one way or the other. Screw it! Use mono and ASP.Net!

OK, probably not.

In the meantime, I'm looking into combining Maypole and Mason to get a framework together to support the applications that MVC is appropriate for.

Friday September 03, 2004

While I can't say that mod_perl sucks more than PHP (nor can I say the same thing about Java and Struts, though it's strengths are narrower). They all suck in one way or another.

At least the PHP fans have a good sense of humor about how much the other guys suck.

Or maybe they're just angry cause Doug kinda orphaned mod_perl 2.0