Perl in Web Development [closed]

Question

I have heard a lot about using Perl in web development for CGI scripts but are they still widely used today? From a development (Not an Administrative) point of view, is it worth learning? What would be an example of something that is better handled in Perl than PHP?

Thanks

Answer 1

My answer is that CGI is obsolete and you shouldn’t learn web programming in Perl in combination with CGI. There’s a very nice web framework called Mojolicious, that could be a fun way to get started with web programming in Perl. Once you want to deploy your application to a server, you can use PSGI to interface between the server and your app. Dotcloud seems to be a promising, hassle-free host for such apps.

As for the PHP vs. Perl question, that’s hard to answer without causing a flamewar. For me, Perl is much more mature and better thought-out ecosystem. Opinions may vary.

Answer 2

Don't bother with CGI in any language (Perl, C, etc) but look at modern web frameworks. And in this area Perl is fully loaded:

• Dancer
• Catalyst
• Mojolicious
• WebNano

And since they all use PSGI you can deploy them on any server such as FastCGI, Apache/mod_perl, nginx and as legacy CGI scripts. There are also Perl specific application servers like Starman, Corona, Tatsumaki, etc.