SPUG: Java, Perl, large-scale projects

[Don Shanks]

First of all, I never have and never intend to work for Cobalt group. I
do, however, know people who do. I will not go into the 'rumors' I have
heard. That said I have known several businesses or employees from those
business that have made the transition from PERL to Java. I myself
learned Java so I could port one of my x-company's apps from PERL to
Java. Myself and everyone I have talked to believe that moving from PERL
to Java is a slow and arduous process, not to mention ( any I only speak
of the apps I know of), a mistake. Even when the apps are written from
scratch, it takes much longer to get functionality back to the original
standard. Maybe throwing tons of money and developers at it will solve
those issues, but I have even heard of companies having to pay extra
developers to get it back to PERL before the bomb exploded.

Having programmed both, I can normally achieve my goal in less than half
the time if I use PERL. Plug-in apps are completely possible in PERL,
and using mod_perl gives you the ultimate control of the Apache server.

Having tried the rest, I'll stick with the best. PERL.

Don Shanks
Senior Applications Systems Engineer
Cell Systems Initiative - University of Washington
dshanks at u.washington.edu




-----Original Message-----
From: owner-spug-list at pm.org [mailto:owner-spug-list at pm.org] On Behalf
Of Creede Lambard
Sent: Friday, 14 June, 2002 07:04
To: Eric Johanson
Cc: spug-list at pm.org
Subject: RE: SPUG: Java, Perl, large-scale projects


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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