Re: [PLUG] Advice for Web Application Framework

[Chaz Meyers <plug@thechaz.net>]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:11 PM, John Karr <brainbuz@brainbuz.org> wrote:
> I'm starting development on a web based data application. Since this will be
> a fairly large application I would like to select a Framework (ie Django,
> Ruby on Rails, Catalyst) or collection of libraries/modules so that I can
> focus on logic and functionality.

If you want to stick with Perl but don't have much programming
experience, I recommend looking at CGI::Application.

Catalyst is awesome and I believe has a larger community surrounding
it, but it takes advantage of programming concepts and Perl syntax
which may not be familiar to you, so there might be a steeper learning
curve.

In contrast, in your usual C::A webapp you're just writing a fairly
straightforward class. It's pretty transparent what's going on, and
CGI/Application.pm is fairly understandable to read for someone even
with a little Perl OOP experience.  As you become more experienced,
you have the option of adding more advanced functionality like hooks
and plugins, but none of those are needed when you're getting started.

> I plan to take advantage of the fact
> that Postgres supports writing Stored Procedures in PERL to move logic from
> the front-end to the database, which further supports PERL as first choice
> and Python (which is also supported by PostGres) as second choice.

I don't know your exact situation so this bit may be completely
irrelevant to you. If you have multiple applications touching the
database, stored procedures can help a lot to eliminate duplication of
logic and ensure data integrity.

However, if your database is just acting as a data store for your
webapp and you know for a fact that no other application will ever
touch your database directly, it might be smart to keep as much of
your logic in your application as you can. Web nodes are very easy to
scale to multiple machines. Throw a reverse proxy in front of a bunch
of web nodes, and as long as they're not writing session data to disk
you're set. Scaling to a second database machine can be much more
tricky.

- Chaz Meyers
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