Perl is more viable for web development than ever!
Today on StackOverflow, an old thread popped up that prompted me to answer. That answer became a slightly longer compendium of recent developments in Perl and Perl-for-web.
I will copy the text here, but I am asking you to vote it up so that it will show for future viewers. So that I will not be getting undue points, I have made it community wiki (also means you can amend if you want).
Vote here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/8828209/468327
== Post Content ==
This is an old question, but I thought I should update the readers. I am happy to report that in my opinion Perl is more viable for web development than ever! Along with old friends Catalyst
and (recently revamped) Mason
, there are some great new entries Mojolicious
(or visit mojolicio.us) and Dancer
. I’m sure there are others too.
Perhaps the biggest improvement is PSGI
/Plack
(or visit http://plackperl.org/).
PSGI is an interface between Perl web applications and web servers, and Plack is a Perl module and toolkit that contains PSGI middleware, helpers and adapters to web servers.
With these improvements have come more cloud hosting platforms: for a couple examples read more here.
Perl itself is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. Between Moose
object framework (and lighter clones like Mouse
) and the ideals of the Modern Perl
movement (readability while using modern best practices), Perl seems to be growing and its users are excited and motivated.
Personally I have been enjoying Mojolicious. I like its built-in servers and templating engine. I also like that you can make a Mojolicious::Lite
application in a single file! That said I really haven’t played with Dancer or other frameworks, so if you are coming back to Perl or new to Perl, I would encourage you to take a look at those too.
In closing Perl-for-web has come a long way since CGI.pm. If you’ve been away for a while, its worth another look.