Perl e-commerce?

['lesleyb']

On Thu, Sep 15, 2011 at 04:18:50PM +0200, Mallory van Achterberg wrote:
> 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.
Indeed they do.

> 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.
and that doesn't appear to be the CPAN/Perl model, of which I've gained an
impression of a lot of individuals solving problems they encounter at a
generiic level and then offering them to the wider user base.  
Until recently I would never have thought about umping in and bug fixing on
someone else's module.   

I have submitted bug reports in the past, only to have one finally rejected
quite recently because of the lack of a patch.  

The other I did try to drill down on the problem but couldn't understand the
module code and then heard it was being rewritten anyway.  After the
creator of that module stated on the mailing list that the existing code was
like 'an old woman, reeking of piss' and being 'an older woman', I kind of
decided to put that bug down and go on my way.

> 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).
> 
Well that's good to know ... but how do any of these install on a shared
hosting setup?  That still hasn't been resolved and I can't blame the shared
hosting providers for not wanting to allow the unknowing in on its apache server.

> > 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.
> 
When I look up PSGI I get Perl Web Server Gateway ...  not Python ?
> Great.  M0aR!
> Plack is really valuable to have here. 
So is this a sufficiently safe solution to the 'shared hosting problem'?  If so
how does the Perl community get hosting providers to deploy it?

And where is Perl in the Cloud - apart from providing it of course?
> > -Mallory
Regards 

Lesley