> 5. Java. I am not very optimistic about the rates of development of Perl
> web frameworks, but at least the situation is slowly improving. However,
> Java is far ahead of Perl in terms of standard approaches to web apps
> (Spring, Hibernate) and available expertise. If I were starting a
> mid-sized project with several developers now, I'd go with Java in an
> eyeblink, though Perl is still closer to my heart as a language.
> However, I am just a single developer on small projects. OTOH, if a year
> or two down the road I'm forced to port my code either to Perl 6 or to
> Java, I would have a very hard choice to make.
As someone who works with J2EE for a living, I would strongly advise
*against* Java.
With Class::DBI::Loader (and, from what I can tell, SPOPS::DBI), you can
define a class to be based on a certain database table, and objects in
the class will, by default, have getters and setters named for the
fields in the table; Class::DBI::Loader will look at the database schema
and generate the appropriate methods for you. The only thing you need
to provide is the is-a/has-a relationships.
This kind of flexibility is simply not possible in Java, because Java
requires the names for all of your methods to be available at compile
time. So you essentially need to maintain three parallel versions of
your database schema: one in the actual database, one in the Java
classes or interfaces that model the database, and one for the framework
to use to map between them. (To be fair, Hibernate appears to have
tools that can generate the class from the schema or vice versa ... but
I generally distrust code-generation tools.)
I don't know enough to take sides in the religious war between static
and dynamic languages, but I think once you have a program that spends a
significant amount of time interacting with a system outside its own
language framework (e.g., querying and updating a database), that
program should be written in a dynamic language.
-- "If John Kerry was the last best hope for the Republic ... then maybe it wasn't worth saving in the first place. I don't believe that, though. And neither do you." --Dan Layman-Kennedy // seth gordon // sethg at ropine.com // http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/ //_______________________________________________ maypole mailing list maypole at lists.netthink.co.uk http://lists.netthink.co.uk/listinfo/maypole
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