Perl: The Standard Approach to Application Development
There are many options for developing web applications using Perl, for example
- Perl CGI / Fast CGI
- mod_perl
- Using any frameworks like Catalyst / Dancer
- There is a new object system called Moose
I did some basic Perl programming about a year ago, creating scripts for some automation, etc.
With all the suggestions, which is a really good mix of frameworks / modules / approaches for app development.
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First of all, you need to know that you don't want to worry about deploying your application. So don't think about mod_perl, FCGI or anything like that. Instead, write your application in the PSGI spec and then you can deploy it to any environment you want.
Most (probably all) modern Perl web frameworks have built-in PSGI support. Therefore, if you write a Catalyst application (or Dancer or Mojolicious or ...), it will already be written to work with PSGI.
I personally use Dancer for most of my own projects. Customers seem to prefer Catalyst - perhaps because they are better known and more powerful. Other people like Moholius. And you might think about getting started with Web :: Simple.
It's hard to know what to recommend without knowing more about your specific project. Why not try them all and see which one you like best.
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I use perl primarily for sysadmin support. So basically - run a lot of things on a lot of tasks like servers and an odd "web page" front end.
I recently ported CGI towards Mojolicous with an nginx reverse proxy on the front. The reason I figured it out is honestly because I liked the name (And any system that includes servers called "morbo" and "hypnotoad" is pretty funny too).
Because I am using nginx in front of it with a "static ish" configuration, I can connect http and https ports to it and apply common standards for authentication, access and logging. But I can run a combination of applications and static content at the same time (on multiple hosts if needed).
Hypnotoad seems to work really well for running an application instance for a pre-release app, while morbo works well as a dev server. Because of the proxy server, doing a "preview" like this infrastructure is also quite attractive.
I cannot offer many possibilities for scalability and performance - it rather depends on many other things. Everything I do is primarily data manipulation and graphical display, so more based on IO drives.
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