You'd think, with PHP racing ahead of Perl in popularity for small/medium-sized web development projects, that the movers and shakers behing PHP's closest competitor - mod_perl+Mason - would have made it a little easier by now to get things up and running. However, on both Fedora1 and WinXP my experiences have led me to conclude that, much as I prefer Perl to PHP, I will have to go with PHP for most web projects and for teaching a new course I have planned: "Open Source Web Development". mod_perl+Mason is by far the superior technology but when it comes to usability it hits ground zero as there are still so many compatibility issues.

Installing on WinXP was OK up to a point. I installed Apache 1.3 instead of 2.0, knowing how touchy Mason can be with 2.0. I then installed Perl 5.8 from ActiveState. All OK so far. ActiveState don't do mod_perl for some reason so I hunted down mod_perl from the Apache mod_perl website. Fine so far. Next HTML::Mason from ActiveState with mod_perl now configured within httpd.conf. It loaded OK but wouldn't work due to missing Apache::Request. Tried ppm> install Apache-Request but nothing. Searched Google and discovered that Apache::Request is part of libapreq. Someone tell me why it isn't in the same namespace/format as other Apache Perl modules. Several posts by similarly confused users indicated that ActiveState's libapreq doesn't work with mod_perl. The Apache mod_perl site had only one paragraph dealing with the issue and a link to a libapreq.ppd file. When requested from ppm> install this produced an error: "No suitable installation target found for package libapreq". Someone suggested creating my own ppd file but I'd had enough by then and it's non-trivial anyway.

With Fedora Core I hit similar problems. Fedora comes with Apache 2 and even mod_perl pre-installed. However, HTML::Mason won't work with Apache2 and neither will Apache::Template, the closest alternative. Re-installing Apache to get 1.3 is non-trivial for me and in any case doesn't address the real issue: the Perl web development community, rather than just doing their own thing (mod_perl, Mason, Template::Toolkit), need to seriously address usability. When there was no PHP on the block non-sysadmin users would probably fall back on simple CGI if they couldn't get everything to work but in the last few years the alternative for many who have pulled out their hair over these issues is to simply switch to PHP which "just works". PHP is now the MacOSX to Perl's Linux from Scratch. If you need to teach students how to get a web development environment up and running PHP is going to win over mod_perl+Mason every time because the latter doesn't give itself a chance to leave the starting block.

20040812 Janitored by Corion: Moved from Perl Monks Discussion

In reply to Why can't mod_perl+Mason just work? by gunzip

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