I've been researching and coding for a couple months now with the decision
that I'd rewrite the family website/portal using mod_perl with
CGI::Application. I still like the idea, but a couple things recently have
made me rethink it.
For starters, the perl DBI is a bit of a pain to program. At work, I've
become very accustomed to using PEAR's DB library, and while it's in many
ways derived from perl's DBI, it's much simpler to use.
Then there's the whole HTML::Template debacle. There's several ways in which
to write the templates, but they don't all work in all situations, and, it
seems they're a bit limited. We've started using PHP's Smarty at work, and
it's much more intuitive, a wee bit more consistent, and almost infinitely
more extendable. I could go the Template::Toolkit route for perl, but that's
almost like learning another whole language.
Then, there's the way objects work in perl versus PHP. I've discovered
that PHP objects are very easy and very extendable. I wouldn't have found
them half as easy, however, if I hadn't already been doing object oriented
programming in perl. One major difference, however, is how easy it is to
create new attributes on the fly, and the syntax is much easier and cleaner.
Add to that the fact that if you want to dynamically require modules in
perl, you have to go through some significant, often unsurmountable, hoops.
So you can't easily have dynamic objects of dynamically defined classes. In
PHP, though, you can require_once or include_once at any time without even
thinking.
The final straw, however, was when I did my first OO application in PHP this
past week. I hammered it out in a matter of an hour or so. Then I rewrote it
to incorporate Smarty in around an hour. And it all worked easily. Then I
wrote a form-handling libary in just over two hours that worked immediately
-- and made it possible for me to write a several screen application in a
matter of an hour, complete with form, form validation, and database calls.
Doing the same with CGI::Application took me hours, if not days.
So, my idea is this: port CGI::Application to PHP. I love the
concept of CGI::App -- it's exactly how I want to program, and I think it's
solid. However, by porting it to PHP, I automatically have session and
cookie support, and database support is only a few lines of code away when I
use PEAR; I'll add Smarty as the template toolkit of choice, but make it
easy to override the template methods to utilize . I get a nice MVC-style
application template, but one that makes developing quickie applications
truly a snap.
This falls under the "right-tool-for-the-job" category; perl, while a
wonderful language, and with a large tradition as a CGI language, was not
developed for the web as PHP was. PHP just makes more sense in this
instance. And I won't be abandoning perl by any stretch; I still use it
daily at work and at home for solving any number of tasks from automated
backups to checking server availability to keeping my ethernet connection
alive. But I have real strengths as a PHP developer, and it would be a shame
not to use those strengths with our home website.
