Perl e-commerce?

[Nicholas Clark]

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 08:23:26PM +0100, Sue Spence wrote:
> On 14 September 2011 10:11, Mallory van Achterberg
> <stommepoes at stommepoes.nl> wrote:
> > Hello all,
> > I was looking around at popular e-commerce setups like Magento
> > and Zend Cart. And I realised most of these are PHP based, for
> > whatever reason.
> >
> > Is there a (decent, maintained) Perl-based e-commerce platform
> > out there?
> 
> I am not an expert in this area but it seems to me that you are
> looking at one particular aspect of one segment of the "e-commerce"
> market and extrapolating far too much from that.  Some hypotheses have
> already been advanced as to why Perl might not be as competitive as it
> used to be in that arena. That doesn't mean it isn't used in medium -
> large - enterprise environments. I have certainly seen it in the last
> one.
> 
> Furthermore, even if Perl no longer has a place in e-commerce, which
> isn't true*, I don't believe you could infer that Perl marketing
> efforts are a bad idea or doomed to fail or that Perl itself is
> utterly b0rk3n and needs somebody to hurry up and fix it.
> 
> If I have misinterpreted your message then I apologise in advance.

I didn't think that she was (that doom and gloom). But I did think that
she's right that there's going to be a bit of a "so what can I use?"
reaction from one segment of software end-users, given that Perl seems to
be far more about toolkits to let you write something, and less about
packages that do what you (think you) want out of the box, and thereby
suck you in slowly.

> *Unless Venda has gone out of business :-)

No, they are recruiting: http://jobs.perl.org/job/14828

As, I believe, are NAP, who use Perl for e-commerce, and Photobox, who use
perl for e-commerce.

But that's all in-house systems, not released open-source platform code.

Possibly that's part of the difference here. Possibly not.

Nicholas Clark