After a particularly brain-numbing hour attempting to persuade a development build of our main web site's Perl back end (on Debian) to actually run on a co-located RedHat Enterprise License server, I wondered aloud, with a degree of frustration, "So what the heck does 'Enterprise' mean, anyway?"
Our sysadmin, who is prone, like all of his ilk, to disparage any and all instances of rampant abuse of buzzwords, offered that it meant, among other things, 'very very slow, uses XML unecessarily, and comes with a default configuration that's no use to man nor beast'.
Mischievously (for reasons perhaps to be explained in a later blog entry), I suggested that that could be summed up in the four letters 'J2EE'.
One of my Java-savvy colleagues (in fact, all my colleagues here are Java-savvy) opined that that wasn't exactly fair, and that 'J2EE' wasn't really anything more than shorthand for 'go read this 400 page document on The Right Way To Do Things'.
Interesting.
I'm in the minority here at $CurrentEmployer, since I /am/ the token Perl developer. But this, and a whole load of other things, have got me wondering. Why isn't there a 'Perl Enterprise Edition'? Maybe there is, and I'm missing it? What would it be, anyway? Perhaps the question is, where's that mysterious 400 page document that tells us what it is?
A few years ago there was a project called P5EE which attempted to do something like this. It didn't really work out and more than a few people were emotionally scarred by the experience
Many of us still flinch when we hear the term "P5EE".
Re:Enterprise Perl
Penfold on 2006-11-22T11:29:59
*chuckle* I did find it in the research for the blog (currently just duplicating entries across from the Blogger version of this blog), and... yeah. Um... Interesting.:)
Why isn't there a 'Perl Enterprise Edition'?
Because making one is dull enough, and maintaining it doubly so. It's real work, and neither something fun that people do in their own time, nor something non-mission critical that is easy and acceptable to publish on company time.
Whereas Sun pay a lot of engineers, tech writers etc to work full time on all things Java.
Given that Perl isn't bankrolled by a certification scheme, a Perl Enterprise Edition would have to be a product, and a saleable product at that. Or so one would have thought, but Activestate's freely downloadable ActivePerl comes bundled with a whole swathe of additional modules - the OS X install appears to have:
If this doesn't fit "Enterprise Perl" then I'm not sure what would.
