Last week London.pm talked about J2EE and P5EE and this week it was the mod_perl list's turn. J2EE defines the standard for developing multitier enterprise applications" (in Java), and we all reckon that it is one of the reasons that Java has taken off so rapidly and is viewed as acceptable in enterprises. J2EE consists of many different parts, some of which Perl can do (JDBC is similar to DBI) and some of which it currently can't (JMS). P5EE is out to maybe change that, or at least talk about Perl 5 Enterprise Extensions. Here are my current thoughts on the subject:
J2EE is primarily about writing standardised APIs that everyone can code to, and I think P5EE should be the same.
CPAN sucks in this way 'cos every module has its own interface which are often at different levels of functionality. This is great for programmers but bad for selling CPAN to enterprises. Think of the difference between the DBI modules and, well, the rest of CPAN.
For example, the Servlet API is similar to what the CGI interface tried to do, but for long-running applications. Lots of webservers now support it, but similar Perl applications have their own, different, APIs (like mod_perl). There's been some work at converting the Servlet API to Perl but this has died. I'm sure it'll be taken up again.
Hence, I think APIs are the way to go. Sorting out APIs is hard. Converting APIs from Java to Perl without thought won't work due to Java's reliance on threads.
Dumrats and I are busy composing our first post to the list. Why not join the list by mailing p5ee-subscribe@perl.org and give us your opinion?
