in reply to Re: Perl as a second language
in thread Perl as a second language

God points. Could you elaborate a bit on the back end maintenance? What kind of things do you need to do there?

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Re^3: Perl as a second language
by blue_cowdawg (Monsignor) on Oct 01, 2007 at 20:29 UTC
        What kind of things do you need to do there?

    So that I don't give away customer confidential information, let me instead enumerate some of the things I use Perl for to do back-end processing in some JSP/Servlet applications that I've created. Keep in mind there are ways to do this in Java as well, but in some cases I don't want the added overhead of the JVM/JRE.

    • Cleaning out old records in database tabls and emailing the results
    • Conversion of uploaded spreadsheets and/or CSV files to databsae rows
    • Cleaning old temporary files the JSP application leaves behind.
    • Backup of database to offsite system
    That's just a short list of things I have Perl doing behind the scenes.

    One of the items that I have Perl doing on one web application I maintain is Java is not allowed to send email directly. The capability exists, but there is no equivilant of Email::Valid to check for invalid email addreses. So the Java application queues up the email send request to a database table and a Perl script that awakens from cron checks the validity of the request, formats the email and sends it on its way.


    Peter L. Berghold -- Unix Professional
    Peter -at- Berghold -dot- Net; AOL IM redcowdawg Yahoo IM: blue_cowdawg