PHP or Perl?

758

Well, i know this is a PHP website....but most development websites are based around a single language or languages anyway so i figured theres gotta be some perl/php developers in here to help me out. I'm writing a web application and i can't decide whether to write it in Perl or PHP, i know them about equally well now and (to me) Perl has more potential, but im having a lot of trouble with mod_perl and such. So im trying to figure out if i should just fix mod_perl or just go back to PHP....any perl/php developers out there to help me out??

dalecosp

PHP = "People Hate PERL"

😃

What kind of trouble are you having w/mod_perl???

jazz_snob

Hmmm...I perl but I have never used mod_perl. I'd say go with what you can get a working product done the fastest. Also, I'll often have a site that's all PHP server pages but calls some perl executables to do some grunt work (like xml parsing for example).

bpat1434

Ah, but now XML parsing can be done via PHP as long as it's 5.0....

I've never worked with Perl, but can say that I do find its functions to be faster in PHP (preg_*). I'm gonna say it's a preference thing. As with anything in coding/web-design: whatever floats your boat.

~Brett

thorpe

Ive never used Perl for anything more than small shell scripts and I just can't imagine it scaling very well into larger applications. It seems to get unwieldy and a little hard to follow after more than a few hundred lines.

758

to dalecosp:
Im having perl load my header file and the footer file, then all the main stuff in the middle (like i usually do with PHP). It works when i run it through perl but when i run it through mod_perl and apache it only outputs the header....and then the browser doesnt even render the header code it sends...

dalecosp

758 wrote:
to dalecosp:
It works when i run it through perl but when i run it through mod_perl and apache it only outputs the header....and then the browser doesnt even render the header code it sends...

Sorry I didn't see this sooner. Any progress?

When you say, "the browser doesn't even render the header code", do you mean that "the server is sending raw PERL to the browser"??

That would seem to indicate that apache doesn't know what to do with your PERL files. Check the settings in httpd.conf, particularly AddHandler directives ...

HTH,

adavis

I know both language, but when I have a choice, always opt for PHP. I am currently converting several script from Perl to PHP and in all cases have been able to cut a goodly number of lines of code. Part of that is from sloppy Perl coding, but some is just that there are built in functions in PHP that aren't there in Perl, or require more steps to accomplish the same task.

bubblenut

Not to sound like a perl fan-boy, but surely that's where CPAN comes in?

jazz_snob

758 wrote:
I'm writing a web application and i can't decide whether to write it in Perl or PHP, i know them about equally well now and (to me) Perl has more potential, but im having a lot of trouble with mod_perl and such.

Maybe take a different perspective to help you decide: what do you want the user to be able to do on the site? Maybe that will suggest which language might be better. I find perl great for report generating (i guess thats because of the name!).

I just now finished an 'accounting' project and I did it in perl because it had to traverse directories and tally up things, then munge those results w/ type of account (from database) and finally generate a CSV of the results. Took about an hour because its spread over 3 servers.

Oh yeah, any kind of 'network' communication I do in perl...ftp, http, mail, etc. Real nice if you have the right CPAN modules.