We faced a similar decision in 1999. Our company made a strategic choice to write all products in perl because we wanted to compete by providing a 100% web-based solution.

We use Apache, ActiveState Perl, and MySQL 4.0 mostly for all our products today. Not to advertise, but you can read about what they do on my company's website or on my personal website for a little more technical description.

We found that most web-based tasks can be quick to respond and provide users with an easy to use interface written in Perl, HTML/CSS, DHTML and JavaScript is more than adequate. We collect and store all kinds of data for small to enterprise size organizations (Network Inventory, SNMP polling, Desktop Inventory, Syslogs/eventlogs/snmp traps, and trouble ticketing)

With that said, the volume of data can present some problems when the back-end is written in perl. Over time we have overcome some complicated issues such as polling 1000s of reports in 5 minutes, receive 1000s of syslog events, and operate a call center within 1 server which essentially is constantly reading/writing to the MySQL back-end.

We did play with postgres a few places along the way and found the perl interface to postgres to be less then desireable. I can't say if it has been improved or not since I looked at it last (Late 2002).

Based on our success, I can say that it can certainly be done in Perl. However, depending on what you are doing, its important to make sure (probably are) the appropriate modules out there before coding the project. Modules can save time and make you more nimble to add and enhance features.

Hope this helps.
Marc

In reply to Re: Advice of picking the language for my job, please by FitTrend
in thread Advice of picking the language for my job, please by gb_lexter

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