[HRPM] Info on Mason

[Jeff Duffy]

On Tuesday, July 17, Collin Cusce wrote:

> I've been researching tons of languages, and even with my Perl bias aside,
> Mason seems to kick some serious ass. What I'm wondering is why isn't it
> being used as much? What is your guy's input on the mod_perl extention?
> Have any of you had any experience with it? It's component system seems
> really nifty, but are there any drawbacks to it?

 Mason is nice (and there are quite a few large sites that use it: Canon,
for one), but I think suffers from two problems. First, you'll find that as
time passes and your site grows in complexity, you end up with a thousand
components to manage. This can get quite unwieldy, so it's very important
with Mason to plan out the structure of your components first. I like to
keep as much code as possible out of the pages, so I recommend designing and
coding a few utility modules to do most of your work, and calling them from
your components.

 Second, since it's mod_perl-based, you cannot separate your content
generation engine from the web server, so you cannot scale your site by
spreading the load amongst more content engines without also beefing up your
web server. For many that's not an issue at all.

 Ignoring the proprietary content management systems (like ColdFusion) for
the moment, you will really end up getting the best performance out of the
system with which you are most familiar. I have had to do a lot of JSP and
JavaBean work lately, so I'm pretty adept at whipping out a few pages
without too much problem. but if you have no Java coders, it makes no sense
to go that route.

 Jeff