Phoenix.pm: Perl Advocacy

[Cakperldev at aol.com]

Hi there everyone. Hope Tuesday's meeting went well.

I have a question about advocacy that I'd like your thoughts on.

First, some background.

I work for the Phoenix Municipal Court in the IST department writing and 
maintaining software for our Court Management System. This system is written 
in a language called JAM. The system is currently character based and the 
court would like to move to GUI. There are a number of possible commercial 
solutions all of which have some drawbacks so I took the liberty of 
developing and demonstrating a possible perl/Tk solution for my boss as 
another option.

He is interested in it but has some reservations about converting our entire 
system to perl. I have already used perl to solve some really sticky problems 
in our system so he knows that perl can do the job. His concerns are about 
the longevity and viability of perl as a language. Will it be around in two 
years? Who maintains it? If we update our database, where do we get new 
drivers? Who supports it? That kind of thing.

So my question to you is, if you were in my place, what resources would you 
point your boss to in order to improve his/her comfort level with perl as a 
real world solution?

Thanks
CAK