[HRPM] Info on Mason

[Collin Cusce]

    Thanks for the advice! Welp, my options are pretty limited. I work in an
NT-oriented office doing CF development (don't comment). I am most familiar
with Perl as my secondary scripting language, so Mason seems like the most
logical choice for me. Yet, my other co-workers dont seem to have a
preference. I have one who knows Java, but doesnt seem to like the idea of
using JSP, and I have another who wants to do PHP, but doesn't seem have the
time to deal with working on the implementation. So that leaves me, who has
the time, effort, and interest to deal with and research the language of my
choice to go with. Not only that, but the component system has benefits that
would allow us to develop a Content Mangement and Content Reporting System
just by placing a header file on our pages b/c components can read each
other's output text. So, Mason is probably what we are going to go with, but
I just wanted to make sure I knew what we were getting into before I
sugested it.

    ----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeff Duffy" <jeff at alanne.com>
To: <norfolk-pm-list at happyfunball.pm.org>
Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2001 11:34 AM
Subject: RE: [HRPM] Info on Mason


>
> 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
>
>