Erik Zoltán has written an article for IBM developerWorks
comparing Perl, PHP and Java Servlets for server-side web development. As you would expect, Java makes easy things complicated, and PHP makes easy things easy with some loss of power.
Perl, of course, just gets the job done.
In all fairness, this article started out with a simple "Hello, World!" CGI script. Speeding up a Perl program consisting of little more than a single print statement doesn't require mod_perl.
I disagree.
Much of how a simple "Hello, World!" Perl CGI program takes up time to run is the startup time for the perl binary to load and the (probably quite small in this case) time to compile the program.
Sure, you're not gonna be waiting long for either of those to happen, but if you needed to run your "Hello, World!" program a million (or even only a hundred thousand) times a day, getting it to run under mod_perl would give you an astounding amount of optimization.
(quite probably it'd be faster than an equivelant program in C, simply because the C program would still need to be loaded by the OS every time)
In other words, it's one of the more completely useless articles to appear on the 'net. Right up there with the Big Red Button That Doesn't Do Anything.
Much of how a simple "Hello, World!" Perl CGI program takes up time to run is the startup time for the perl binary to load and the (probably quite small in this case) time to compile the program.
It doesn't matter how quickly a program runs if it is incorrect. The first thing to do when learning a new language (e.g. Perl for CGI programming) is to take the first baby steps, such as "Hello, World!". After that, it's time to apply the optimizations, like mod_perl.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil in programming. -- C.A.R. Hoare
This article presents 3 languages, and 3 architectures, which should have been compared separately.
By that logic, Java cannot be compared with anything except itself, because nothing else uses the Java Servlet architecture except Java (modulo Jython and TclBlend). The fact remains that there are a bazillion and one different ways to do dynamic pages on the web, and Perl/PHP/Java are frequent contenders in some way, shape or form. This article offers a cursory comparison to introduce three of the many possibilities, and shows Perl in a relatively nice light.
A more scientifically rigorous study would be about as thick as Camel III, and unread by the target audience -- beginners who can't make up their mind between Perl and something else.
By that logic, Java cannot be compared with anything except itself, because nothing else uses the Java Servlet architecture except Java
