perl used in large developments - I need help

Nathan Bailey Nathan.Bailey at its.monash.edu
Wed Mar 19 18:30:06 CST 2003


Simon,
	The my.monash portal is written in perl.  Counting lines of
code in HTML::Mason is an interesting activity (half HTML, half perl),
but let's say we've got 50,000 lines of code, without counting the
incredible power of CPAN that we leverage considerably.

Universitys are traditionally more open to open source, but we're still
a somewhat conservative organisation.  Monash is Australia's largest
University (since you're dealing with a US company), with some 50,000
students spread across Australia, South-East Asia, South Africa and
Europe (that's campuses, there's also OCL/Distance Ed).

The portal has been a significant endeavour over a number of years
(i.e. it wasn't a backroom project).

I'd be happy to provide a reference of an "enterprise level
application" written in perl that scales very well in terms of
performance, and for which we have been able to find both outside
support and significant training expertise for.

my.Internet provide a similar portal in perl (Hi Scott :-).  A recent
presentation to a conference indicated that much of Yahoo is in perl
(and a range of other languages) and is moving to PHP.  Google makes
heavy use of perl.  In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any
large scale public portal that doesn't use perl (or python or PHP) at
some level.  J2EE is great, and we're certainly keeping an eye on it,
but perl is by no means dead.

Having said that, I wouldn't necessarily be writing an ERP in perl though
-- that _is_ where J2EE does work pretty well.  But if you're talking
about _web-enabling_ an ERP -- perl may do wonders for you.

HTH,
N (a company with an ERP in Fortran is giving _you_ language grief? :P)



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