Supporting Material

[Joel Meulenberg]

> Our web group has been moved to the IT division. They are primarily
> Sun/Oracle but Perl is pretty much unknown to them. (Of course it's
> an
> exec-level meeting and my boss is the only programmer in attendance
> anyway.)
> 
> In this meeting they're going to decide whether our primary language
> is
> Perl or something else (he told me 'Java' -- I think the choice must
> go
> deeper than that).

Yikes.  An executive level meeting is going to dictate what programming
language should be used (or "preferred" or whatever) at your company?
I can understand a group of software development
leads/management/developers getting together to explore, discuss, and
decide such a matter, but executives?  Wow.

> My boss asked me to find some supportive Perl material for him to
> pass
> at an IT meeting.

Magazine/web articles are nice, but I'd recommend the "try it before
you buy it" approach whenever possible.  e.g.- Take a couple typical
small webish projects (or maybe just portions of projects if you don't
have any "small" projects) and try doing them in a Java environment
(e.g.- servlets) and a corresponding Perl environment (e.g.- mod_perl).
 And if you do non-web development, repeat this exercise for
representative projects from those realms.

Honestly, what you'll probably find is that for certain kinds of work
Java is better suited, and for others, Perl is better suited.
For example, I have a hard time imagining Java being better than Perl
for sysadmin scripting type work.  But for larger, OO-architected
systems, Java is likely a better choice than Perl (not that you can't
do it in Perl, but Java is probably a better fit).

Since both Java and Perl can work for many kinds of projects, I suspect
a greater consideration may be which language most of the developers
are familiar with - or maybe how much infrastructure (code libraries,
APIs, app frameworks, etc.) your company has already built in either
language.

If you're going to be be doing a lot of interaction with Oracle, the
Perl DBI is really quite nice (and the DBD::Oracle driver is solid). 
IMHO, JDBC is kinda painful to use by comparison. 

> My employer is www.sme.org and I won't say the word "simple". Let's
> just
> say I've been asked to find STRAIGHT TALKING, easy-to-understand
> material making our case. Articles from major traditional trade
> magazines are best.
> 
> Below are a few I've pulled from dozens I looked at yesterday.
> 
> I'm looking for a few more. Any suggestions?

I would also caution you against basing any decision solely on articles
because then you are opening yourself up to doing what the marketeers
would have you do.  Java has been successful because of its merits but
also because it has a lot of marketing muscle behind it.  
e.g.- I've seen articles comparing the performance of Java servlets to
Perl CGI scripts (non-mod_perl) (apples and oranges really) - from Sun.
Perl has been successful despite a lack of marketing.  In other words,
Perl must have some very compelling merits to have become this
successful.

I did a quick search for "Java versus Perl" type articles, but didn't
find much.  If I find anything, I'll be sure to forward it to the list.

+Joel

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