| The start of this thread is some FUD raised not by the actual thread starter, but a customer expressing concerns about web development and web frameworks here: Hi and sorry for the provocative title of my post :) One of our customers is doing a detailed review of a mason/modperl ERP
app we've built for them since 2001. Prodded by some buzzword-compliant
consultants they are expressing concerns that the app's underlying
technologies - perl, modperl and mason - are becoming obsolete. They
feel that a web application framework must have 'rails' or some other
buzzword in its name. But their main argument is that perl is declining as a web developement
language. Also they rightly feel that competent perl developers are
becoming harder to find. What arguements could I use to address these concerns and convince them
that their initial investement in perl is still safe and won't be
obsolete in 10 years? The client's local developers (who maintain the app we've built) feel
that mason gives too much freedom to write messy code and badly
structure a web app. Indeed mason has very little constraints, maybe just slightly more than
straight modperl. So it requires experienced, self-disciplined devs,
which are few and far between. So my second question is, what perl web development framework should we
recommend to our client? Catalyst looks like a winner, but maybe there
are others? Thanks for your insights, -- This is not really about Perl in the "jobmarket" - just in web development and how it seems to "be behind" against all the cool buzzwordy frameworks out there. |
Having looked at Catalyst I'm not impressed - just look at their documentation (which seems to be a series of PODs) and compare it with Django, which has tutorials, detailed docs, etc. I'm no fan of Rails, so maybe Django is a better way to go? Django is very structured, very MVC (almost) and plays nicely with your HTML coders.
Whenever I have worked on a perl project which someone else has started, it's always been a hideous mess. Rather than fight to keep things as they are, if I were in your position I'd agree wholeheartedly with the consultants, except their conclusion - just name another successor product apart from Rails and make a strong case for it. (Although I'm sure there are plenty of people here who would defend Rails and I'm not looking for an argument with them.)