SPUG: Java, Perl, large-scale projects

[Creede Lambard]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Eric Johanson wrote:

> My 2c,
> 
> When I worked at cobalt in Jan 2000, there was a 'big push for java'.  The
> basis I was told was that it leaks to much for modperl, and they are
> spending a fortune in hardware.   The performance of the code was terrible.
> 
> The 'patch' at the time was to have the perl output as much static data as
> possible - - that helped, but it was still a problem for all of the
> dynamic content.  I'm shocked that they haven't rolled java out yet - it
> has been over 2 years of development time (I recall estimates of  _a few
> months_ to port it - - I guess that didn't happen).
> 
> I hope that Creede can give us an update.  I would think that something is
> up in java at this point.
> 
> http://dealernet.com/ - still using .cgi
> http://www.toyotadealer.com/seattle/ - still using .cgi
> 
> Please don't read the wrong thing into this post; Cobalt was a fun place
> to work, and there had been some great people to work with.
> 
> -Eric
> 

The vast majority of the sites are still using perl. I don't know about the
other groups, but Chrysler isn't doing mod_perl, we're doing straight
template-based CGI. Otherwise it WOULD be impossible to maintain everything.
As it is we have master scripts that generate the websites in general, then
we can make changes to specific websites as necessary.

As for the Java side, the way they've explained it to us is that Nitra (the
Java initiative) is an architecture that we, or the dealers, can plug
applications into and out of. So we can write applications that run on Nitra,
but (for instance) if a dealer group has a custom finance calculator they
want to deploy on their dealer web sites, they can write it to Nitra
specifications and plug it right in. The problem with the two-year rollout is
that doing something like this is harder than it sounds, and it sounds pretty
tough.  

At any rate the idea is that eventually everything at Cobalt is going to be
moved over to Nitra, including data feeds, log parsing and other back-end
stuff. Personally I think it would make more sense to use Java on the
application and presentation layers and Perl for the network layer, if you
will. But, no one asked me.

-- 
 * .~. `(  --------------------------------------------------------------
` / V \  . Creede Lambard                : When in danger, when in doubt,
 /(   )\   creede at penguinsinthenight.com : run in circles, scream & shout
  ^^-^^    --------------------------------------------------------------

Perl Programmer and Linux Sysadmin, reasonable rates. Inquire within.


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