[BNE-PM] What do you use Perl for?

[Derek Thomson]

Tony Obermeit wrote:
> My development is categorised in three areas, application development 
> (web/html applications with database (sql/oracle) back ends), build 
> scripts to support application development, ad-hoc scripts.  

The Perl DBI database integration is very good, indeed. And it comes 
with a command line tool that is sometimes superior to the one shipped 
with the product (I'm looking at you, Oracle :).

> Previously 
> I used perl for all three of these areas, now I use java for application 
> development, ant for build scripts and perl for ad-hoc scripts.
> 

Okay, my question is: what technical reason is there for using Java for 
web applicatoins instead of Perl?

I haven't ever done any web applications, so I really don't know, but my 
experience with Java is that it's large, slow, not very portable really, 
and the database integration support just doesn't measure up to Perl's 
DBI module, and it takes a *lot* more code to get anywhere.

That was in 1999, maybe things have changed (but I still have to run 
Java GUIs that are too slow and suck up 46M!!). Is there any real 
advantage over, say Apache + mod_perl + Perl?

Regards,
Derek.