Light reading over the Holidays
So, it's Thanksgiving weekend and I find myself online reading a few articles and blog posts. One of note that I wanted to comment on and point out:
The benefits of vanilla CGI vs FastCGI for Perl apps
The benefits of vanilla CGI vs FastCGI for Perl apps
Interesting read from Mark Stosberg. I'm quite familiar with Mark from his work with CGI::Application,l as I've been a fan of that perl module for many years now. I think there is a bias here that I need to mention, and that I think Mark and I share.
What people value in a web development process/toolkit is significantly weighted by the process and tools that web developer a) first learned, and b) is most confortable using. Meaning that a developer whose first experience programming web applications was with Catalyst and has since found Mojo more comfortable and uses it regularly, will have a different set of "values" (or criteria by which other things are compared) than a developer who started web development with straight CGI.pm and is now a Jifty user. (this bias should extend itself to any and all programmers, but I find it more appearant in web developers where there is more contention about which toolkit is better than another).
Whew. OK, after all that, I have to say that I agree with Mark and feel that "vanilla CGI" is a great way to get things rolling as a developer without having (usually) to change a thing to a web server. Just write your code and go. I also feel that if people expect things to run slow in CGI and not in mod_perl or FastCGI because that is their biased environment of choice, then they will program accordingly. Meaning that they will write code that is slower, heavier, etc. because "oh, mod_perl will take care of it and it will be fast enough," or something similar.
I've never actualy heard anyone say that, but I hear things close to it from other developers (Java web developers mostly) who feel like everything is perfectly normal when you have to rely on huge complex tools and frameworks and middleware and dedicated containers and separation of tiers and abstracted everything and this and that and the kitchen sink too just to develop web applications. This "normal bloat" I'll call it, is where that bias I mentioned earlier really comes out. If people can't even see that their tools and process is overly complex, burdensome, and has a moderate to high degree of dependencies for normal development and opperation, than how can you persuade them that it is perfectly fine to live without that? How can you make them see that that is not "normal" for many, many other web developers?
Living without FastCGI??? Shudder. You're still using perl for web development?!?!?!? How can you live without Hibernate for data access (or replace with your favorite language specific tool here)?!?! Running perl CGI without mod_perl??? Are you stupid??
Yes, stupid like a fox. Err... I mean, doh.
What people value in a web development process/toolkit is significantly weighted by the process and tools that web developer a) first learned, and b) is most confortable using. Meaning that a developer whose first experience programming web applications was with Catalyst and has since found Mojo more comfortable and uses it regularly, will have a different set of "values" (or criteria by which other things are compared) than a developer who started web development with straight CGI.pm and is now a Jifty user. (this bias should extend itself to any and all programmers, but I find it more appearant in web developers where there is more contention about which toolkit is better than another).
Whew. OK, after all that, I have to say that I agree with Mark and feel that "vanilla CGI" is a great way to get things rolling as a developer without having (usually) to change a thing to a web server. Just write your code and go. I also feel that if people expect things to run slow in CGI and not in mod_perl or FastCGI because that is their biased environment of choice, then they will program accordingly. Meaning that they will write code that is slower, heavier, etc. because "oh, mod_perl will take care of it and it will be fast enough," or something similar.
I've never actualy heard anyone say that, but I hear things close to it from other developers (Java web developers mostly) who feel like everything is perfectly normal when you have to rely on huge complex tools and frameworks and middleware and dedicated containers and separation of tiers and abstracted everything and this and that and the kitchen sink too just to develop web applications. This "normal bloat" I'll call it, is where that bias I mentioned earlier really comes out. If people can't even see that their tools and process is overly complex, burdensome, and has a moderate to high degree of dependencies for normal development and opperation, than how can you persuade them that it is perfectly fine to live without that? How can you make them see that that is not "normal" for many, many other web developers?
Living without FastCGI??? Shudder. You're still using perl for web development?!?!?!? How can you live without Hibernate for data access (or replace with your favorite language specific tool here)?!?! Running perl CGI without mod_perl??? Are you stupid??
Yes, stupid like a fox. Err... I mean, doh.
My bias for web development leads me to value these aspects for web development tools and processes:
Ok. I think I've rambled enough, but I hope my view point has been laid out. I agree that web development using perl and straight CGI is perfectly normal, fast, and reasonable. Those who scoff otherwise need to check their biases.
- Lightweight code, lightweight framework, lightweight resource consumption- don't add things that I don't need, don't load a bunch of libraries and extras that I didn't ask to be laoded.
- Allow me as a developer to control everything (or as close to that as possible)- I want to control error messages, logging, database connections, access to templates, what's in those templates, code flow, etc.
- No dependencies on editors. IDEs can be nice, but they should not be required to write/edit normal code (whatever normal means to you). You should be able to chose an editor for you that has nothing to do with your code.
- No dependencies on system administration. This is a tough one for me to admit to because I do so much sys admin work every day, but for a web development standpoint there should be no reason for a coder to manage/deal with configs and restarting system services like a web server. The web server should be configured once and be able to run a coder's code without restarting.
Ok. I think I've rambled enough, but I hope my view point has been laid out. I agree that web development using perl and straight CGI is perfectly normal, fast, and reasonable. Those who scoff otherwise need to check their biases.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Light reading over the Holidays.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://spencerchristensen.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/11
I totally agree and to be honest this is not a long term viewpoint of mine. I mean, sure I like things "light", but I definitely fall under the category of someone who "grew up" using frameworks like Catalyst, CakePHP, Django, etc. I do feel like these frameworks are lighter than many J2EE frameworks and I appreciate that.