IBM to build the next generation of eBay, using Java and WebSphere.
Microsoft and BEA+Sun were the chief rivals in this bidding process, but eBay claims it went with IBM because of IBM's deep Java experience.
That makes me wonder: any suitably talented small team could build a large webapp the size of eBay in a handful of languages and environments. Paul Graham is fond of pointing out that he built an ecommerce system in Lisp, and that Orbitz was originally implemented in Common Lisp. Ars Digita was attempting to do similar types of things by using Tcl. With enough force, I'm sure you could build a similar kind of big site using Zope, PHP or even Korn Shell.
So, where is the large-scale trial-by-fire story for Perl?
Slash.
Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
ziggy on 2002-05-09T16:05:41
Slash is the classic example of a high volume site (slashdot never gets slashdotted.:-), but it's a fundementally different kind of site than something like eBay, MSNBC, Amazon.com (who used to use a lot of Perl, and probably still do), or CNN. It's also a very liberal interpretation of "application server". It's quite difficult to take Slash and build something like, say, a store for LL Bean. Regardless of the strength of slash or the popularity of slashdot, Perl needs something else in the war chest^W^Wtestimonials list.
Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
Matts on 2002-05-09T19:33:49
IMDB? It's basically Amazon for movies nowadays.
Also, Up My Street are serving their Sky Digibox service off AxKit, capable of servicing something like 1500 concurrent users.
But really, I'm not really sure what you're looking for. Large scale examples of perl usage are all over the 'net.Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
ziggy on 2002-05-09T20:16:24
Neither am I actually. I see a big press release disguised as a news story about how eBay chose IBM to be their Java vendor. I'm at a loss at the moment to come up with counter-examples of well-known big sites that are humming nicely with a [well-known, redeployable] Perl backend.But really, I'm not really sure what you're looking for. Large scale examples of perl usage are all over the 'net.It's not that their not there, but the names are almost at the tip of my tongue, not coming out, and it's annoying me. And I'm actively trying to discount the thousands of homebrewed solutions, looking for the sites are quite happily running AxKit, OpenInteract, tt2 and the like.
Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
Matts on 2002-05-09T21:29:19
What you're seeing is simply the difference between a corporate owned technology and a free one developed by a community of keen developers. If my company axkit.com were still alive, I'd release press output of all the major new AxKit sites, but honestly I don't have the time and the resources to do that.Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
darobin on 2002-05-10T02:19:59
There are two things at work here (I think). One is that out appserver is called CPAN (after a fashion, it's just about as "ready to run" as anything else except not so neatly packaged), the other is that no one is sending out press releases. Maybe finding a credible way of doing the latter would be a good idea.
An example of a high-load site with a redeployable Perl backend is JazzValley. You might not know it if you're not a jazz fan that looks for content on the internet, but otherwise it has a large userbase The code in there can be reused for pretty much any site that has features relating to those present on JV (and that includes some rather fancy stuff if you look closely). The sad thing is that the boss of that company is bored with what he's doing and will probably give up... but maybe the code could be taken over, cleaned up a little, and put to work as a generic package.
Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
echo on 2002-05-10T15:24:15
maybe the code could be taken over, cleaned up a little, and put to work as a generic package.
Please, no!Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
darobin on 2002-05-11T12:07:16
Some of us *love* refactoring
;-) I know I would have had fun if it had happened. Re:You're standin' on it, dude!
pudge on 2002-05-13T15:43:49
I am not disagreeing that there are other, or perhaps better, examples, and I am not saying that Slash is the best solution for everything, but while Slash does not include much in the way of "e-commerce", it is not difficult to add it in, any moreso than it would be hard to add it in to any app server system. Slash is extremely flexible. It is an app server in a very real sense. Perhaps you've not seen the code recently.
There was a very good article about etoys and how they used mod_perl and Template Toolkit on perl.com a few months ago.
Here it is: Building a Large-scale E-commerce Site with Apache and mod_perl, by Perrin Harkins
-Dom
Oh well...
