/ 
Apache-mod_perl_guide-1.21
/ src::advocacy

Thoughts about scalability and flexibility

Your need for scalability and flexibility depends on your needs from the web. If you want only a simple guest book or database gateway with no feature headroom, you can get away with any EASY_AND_FAST_TO_DEVELOP_TOOL (Exchange, MS IIS, Lotus Notes, etc).

Experience shows that you will soon want more functionality, that's the point you'll discover the limitations of these "easy" tools. Gradually, your boss will ask for increasing functionality and at some point you'll realize that the tool lacks flexibility and/or scalability. Then your boss will either buy another EASY_AND_FAST_TO_DEVELOP_TOOL and repeat the process (with different unforseen problems), or you'll start investing time learning how to use a powerful, flexible tool to make the long-term development cycle easier.

If you and your company are serious about delivering flexible Internet functionality, do your homework. Then urge your boss to invest a little extra time and resources to choose the right tool for the job. Your long-term Internet site will prove the results.

The boss, the developer and advocacy

Each developer has a boss who participates in the decision-making process. Remember that the boss considers input from sales people, developers, the media and associates before handing down large decisions. Of course, results count! A sales brochure makes very little impact compared to a working demonstration, and demonstrations of company-specific and developer-specific results count big!

Personally, when I discovered mod_perl I did a lot of testing and coding at home and at work. Once I had a working heavy application, I came to my boss with 2 URLs - one for the plain CGI server and the other for the mod_perl-enabled server. It took about 30 secs for my boss to say: `Go with it''. Of course the moment I did it, I have had to provide all the support for other developers, that is why I took time to learn it in first place (that is how this guide was born!).

Chances are that if you've done your homework, you've learned the tools and can deliver results, you'll have a successful project. If you convince your boss to try a tool that you don't know very well, your results may suffer. If your boss follows your development process closely and sees much worse than expected progress, he might say "forget it" and wish never to give mod_perl a second chance.

Advocacy is a great thing for the open-source software movement, but it's best done quietly until you have confidence that you can show productivity. If you can demonstrate to your boss a heavy CGI which is running much faster under mod_perl, that may be a strong argument for further evaluation. Your company may even sponsor a portion of your learning process.

Learn the technology by working on sample projects. Learn how to support yourself and learn how to get support from the community; then advocate your ideas to your boss. Then you'll have the knowledge; your company will have the benefit; and mod_perl will have the reputation it deserves.

A summary of perl/cgi discussion at slashdot.org

Well, there was a nice discussion of merits of Perl in CGI world. I took the time to summarize this thread, so here is what I've got:

Perl Domination in CGI Programming? http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/99/10/20/1246241.shtml

  • Perl is cool and fun to code with

  • Perl is very fast to develop with

  • Perl is even faster to develop with if you know what CPAN is :)

  • Math intensive code and other stuff which is faster in C/C++, plugged in into Perl with XS/SWIG and transparent to perl user of the modules.

  • Most CGI apps do text processing, where perl excels at

  • Forking and loading (unless code is shared) a C/C++ optimized CGI produces an overhead

  • Bandwidth is a bigger bottleneck than perl performance (vs C/C++) (not true for Intranets, and might change for Internet in a number of years)

  • For database driven apps, db itself is a bottleneck. lots of posts talk about latency vs throughput.

  • mod_perl, FastCGI, velocigen and perlexec are good solutions for plain mod_cgi slowness

  • other light alternatives to perl and its derivatives mentioned: PHP, Pyhton

  • well, there were almost no voices from the M$ and alike technologies users, I guess that's because they don't read /. :)

  • many said that in many people's minds: 'CGI' eq 'perl' > 0 (the entropy of perl grows bigger :)