chromatic has posted a provocative piece CGI is Dead; mod_perlite is Alive! over at perl.com.

The executive summary says "There was no single, simple way to run and deploy persistent Perl web applications in the easy upload-and-go fashion epitomized by PHP. Many people saw that. Byrne Reese and Aaron Stone did something about it. Their project, mod_perlite, is one of Five Features Perl 5 Needs Now."

The money quote for me is this:

" solutions that have emerged to try and address some of the limitations of CGI have grown too complex to solve the 80 percent of use cases out there: which is stated simply as, "I need a stateless and fast container to run my Perl script.

Aaron: With just upload and run simplicity.

Byrne: Yeah.

Aaron: That's something that competing languages -- well, not always competing, but other languages out there in the ecosystem that have the "upload and run" capability that is really tremendous for the long-tail of individual, personal and small business deployments, not to mention the experimental deployments within a company where you have the secret engineering web server where engineers have the liberty to test out new applications without having to devote so much time that their managers might notice they're doing something besides what they've been assigned. "Upload and run" simplicity is important for those skunk works projects where a lot of new ideas can be explored quickly and easily with Perl."

I haven't tried this, but the whole post is worth a read. As far as I'm concerned, the closer any tool gets to "upload and run simplicity" the better.

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