in reply to Perl Programmer -> J2EE Convert?

You are not asking a simple question, and I don't believe there will be a simple answer. To be frank, even with the terminologies, you cannot expect everybody to understand them in the same way. What exactly is scalability? How are you going to measure it? You ask ten people, they are probably going to give you 10 different answers - all have different focuses. Not to say, a more serious question, do you have any benchmarks, or does anyone have?

You left me wondering, are you looking for solid evidences that Perl are more strong in some areas, or do you want to hear some marketing stuff (without much serious research) - another set of buzz word?

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Re^2: Perl Programmer -> J2EE Convert?
by Anonymous Monk on Oct 12, 2005 at 05:00 UTC
    This drives the question home.... what does scalability mean for your average or above average site. We are not talking google or yahoo here.

    To tell you the truth, I've used Perl in many, high traffic sites. Scalability has never been an issue for me.

    But that is not what investors and other tech people will want to hear. They will assume, correctly or not, that those sites were not busy enough. They assume, most often incorrectly that they will have more traffic. Even if they only have 1000 employees.

    So I guess what I'm asking is why people think java better... why do they belive it will solve the problem? Why is scalability brought up so much for companies who clearly do not require the level of scale they think they do?

    These are marketing questions so I guess I'm asking for a good way to respond to these marketing people. Buzz words or not... that's what I *think* I'm up against.

    Or maybe I'm just going crazy and not focusing on the right companies to sell software to.
[reply]

      Obviously you mixed up capacity with scalability.

      Scalalbility does not particularly care whether you have high traffic or 1000 employees. Scalability is about: whether you can easily configure the system to have the right capacity that you required, so that it uses the right amount of resources to support this capacity. For example, if you only have 1000 employees now, the system can be configured to use the right amount of CPU cycles, memories etc. to support this capacity. What if your company will double its size in 3 years, fine, we reconfigure the system and that process will be painless, so that it can support the traffic for 2000 employees, and probably use 110% more resources. Now you want to open up a sub-company that only has 100 employees with some low end computers, fine, we install a set of the software, and configure it to support only 100 employees, and the low end boxes fit greatly.

      This is scalability.

[reply]

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