Debating web development toolsets

[Kareem Shehata]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org [mailto:owner-tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Alex
> Beamish
> Sent: Wednesday 09 January 2008 10:39
> To: tlug-lxSQFCZeNF4 at public.gmane.org
> Subject: Re: [TLUG]: Debating web development toolsets
> 
> In addition to Richard's excellent post, also keep in mind how large a
> team you are working with, and what resources you can rely upon
> outside that team. My situation is that I'm the only web developer at
> my company, which means that for any web type challenges I have to
> rely on places like Perlmonks [1] and the #perl and #apache IRC
> channels. Don't necessarily make your choice based on technology --
> also think about how you're going to be able to get support and
> feedback for it.

Support is actually what drove this question in the first place.  Reading
the "Agile manifesto", Ruby sounds like a panacea, but if there's no one
else to support it then it's not an option.  So I thought I'd check.

> Also think about trying something simple in a couple of languages, and
> see how you do. You might find that you love PHP; you might discover
> that RoR is really difficult (I haven't used it myself, I'm just
> throwing out ideas here). Try as many options as possible and see what
> works for you.

Yup, it's starting to look like I'm going to need to get through a few
tutorials.  But that will only give me a very shallow impression of a
language, so I wanted to get the ideas and impressions from people with far
more experience.  At least now I have some good ideas of what to look for
and look at.

> I liked Perl pretty well from the start, because it really did 'fit my
> brain' .. but in addition to that, CPAN [2] is a great resource of
> software modules that are tested, pre-packaged and ready to go; and
> there is a local user group, the Toronto Perlmongers [3] with their
> own mailing list and monthly get-togethers. And I've progressed from
> ugly CGI scripts in 1998 that contained HTML code to really nice
> web/database applications written using CGI::Application and
> Template::Toolkit running under mod_perl.

I believe it was Zbigniew who first commented that I should look at what
else I can do with the language, and that has me seriously considering
Python.  If it seems to fit, then that might end up being what I go with.
I've played with Perl just enough to know that it's not exactly my style,
even though it can do just about everything and anything.

> And I loved the earlier quote about how "There are a number of rabid
> old school fans of Perl, but it's been supplanted by PHP." .. Perl is
> actually alive and well; version 5.10 was just released last month --
> Perl's not disappearing any time soon. :) Really. No, Perl 6 isn't
> ready yet, but work continues .. and in the mean time, Perl (5.8 or
> 5.10) is a great language to use. And I hope that doesn't sound too
> rabid. ;)

I think I may have said something about rabid fans, which isn't a bad thing
- in fact, it shows that there's lots of support - it's just hard sometimes
to get past the bias to really understand where things are.  I have no doubt
that Perl is alive and well and probably great for a lot of things, it's
understand what it is (and isn't) good for.

> Good luck, and let us know how it goes.

Will do, thanks for all of the great ideas!

-kms

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