Perl e-commerce?

[Mallory van Achterberg]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 03:54:38PM +0200, Richard Foley wrote:
> I think you've hit the nail on the head, Mallory, "where are the Wordpresses, 
> the Drupals, the Joomlas?..." indeed.  It's easy to sneer at "just some web 
> thingy", but actually it's quite hard to make something both flexible and 
> robust and performant and maintainable.  From what I've seen of Catalyst 
> recently, (and I've been kind of thrust into using it), it's heading in 
> exactly the right kind of direction that's going to promote (post-)modern Perl 
> practices into a working business environment.  *IF* we build "what people 
> want".

I want to note that those all have tens if not hundreds of developers.
I follow some people working on Drupal Core and unlike a Perl module,
it can't have one or two maintainers. Benevolent dictator, maybe,
but a Perly Drupal would need a *lot* of people.
So it's not a question of one person saying ok, let's do it.
But I see it's more than one person worried about marketing, or
getting new developers into Perl, etc.

Catalyst is a good start. It really is. Now I want to see Dancer and
Mojolicious get going as they target different types of developers
(Catalyst is rather huge. Dancer is pretty small and quick. Mojolicious
has wiki capability).

> You can see the (programming and marketing) success of Perl in more or less 
> shrink-wrapped applications like RT, where there are books on the topic, and 
> managers have heard of it, and want it, and will pay people to customize it.  
> Whether you and I like it or not is irrelevant, the point is RT, (for 
> example), has a footprint.  There used to be a myriad of Perl web apps.  Where 
> are they now?  Why haven't they stood the test of time?  Can we claw some of 
> that market back, now people are finding how there is no silver-bullet in PHP, 
> Ruby and Java.  Is this a time to take advantage of a pause, is this that 
> second moment of opportunity?  If so, what will we do with it?

Personally, I'd like to see Python and Ruby do the same. From what I read
on forums and the such, they've had similar issues regarding hosting.

I may be wrong but I thought Python created PSGI specifically because
mod_python was so not working well on Apache. So they thought, screw
catering to one server, we should work well with all of them.

Great.  M0aR!
Plack is really valuable to have here. 

-Mallory