Every once in a while I get to dazzle my friends with some brilliant bits of Perl code (I'm talking about Java friends, mostly; all my Perl seems brilliant to them, fortunately).
They now tend to agree that Perl is a wonderful language, but they're still not headed in the right direction :-)
One of the things one of them tells me is: what about "load-balance", "fault-tolerance", etc?
I've never dealt with that kind of stuff, but according to him, they're very easy to implement with Java...
Anyone with some experience with this and willing to share the knowledge? :-) I only know what those are by hearing about them... don't know anything about fancy details :-)
It could mean anything from sharing user sessions between servers or using a reverse-proxy direct traffic accross mutiple application servers and cache responses to slow connections, etc.
Plucking a figure out of the air, 99% of load balancing and fault tolerence is done with the web servers, database servers & connections, and network design.
There are modules and tools that allow you to integrate this into a perl application, but they are infrastructure issue - using 'Java' won't give you load balancing and fault-tolerence -- buying a million quids worth of Cisco networking, Sun server, IBM software, multiple Point-of-presence hosting and finally a J2EE server that can utilise all the services of everything else might, but only if you design it and ensure the application works with it all. You can do that with Perl too, but there will be less buzzwords and salesmen involved.
Any online trading and a large ammount of the finance analysis and trading support systems are based on perl.
Livejournal and OSDN and several major magazines and newspapers use perl to power their websites.
Perl keeps the Internet working and running every day.
