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BBC Creates 'Perl on Rails'
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sat Dec 01, 2007 11:28 AM
from the this-isn't-the-third-rail-is-it dept.
from the this-isn't-the-third-rail-is-it dept.
Bogtha writes "Long-time users of Perl for their public websites, and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites, the BBC have fused the two by creating a 'Perl on Rails' that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings, while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb's high-traffic public websites. This is already powering one of their websites, and is set to be used in the controversial iPlayer project as well."
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Holy Crap (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Holy Crap (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, but add a few $'s and %'s in the right places, and it turns into a one-line cross-platform implementation of iPlayer written in Perl. (If your Perl code can be understood by humans without extreme effort, you're just not trying.)
Parent
Re:Holy Crap (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Holy Crap (Score:5, Funny)
I don't see the problem...
understand it easily if longtime perl programmer($self);
Parent
Re:Holy Crap (Score:5, Insightful)
"Long-time users of Perl for their public websites," - an appositive
"and having successfully used Ruby on Rails for internal websites," - another appositive, successfully connected with a conjunction
"the BBC" - the subject of the sentence (which the appositives are in apposition to)
"have fused the two by creating a 'Perl on Rails'" - a perfectly fine predicate
"that has the advantages of rapid development that Rails brings," - with a relative clause
"while performing well enough to be used for the Beeb's high-traffic public websites." - and another modifying clause.
In short: it's a sentence. It's grammatical. It's comprehensible. Quit whining.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Madness, I say (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I'm not getting involved with any of this. I'm holding out for Rails on Rails. You don't have to write any code, you just submit a bid and the project is finished.
Re:Madness, I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds to me like a bunch of Perl coders with a few million lines of corporate code who thought this would be easier than learning another language for one specific smallish project.
Parent
Re:Madness, I say (Score:4, Interesting)
I seriously doubt they have very much Perl code around; there's not much dynamic content on BBC. I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl
Parent
Re:Madness, I say (Score:5, Insightful)
Flat files that are pre-generated from a database backend, maybe. As in a cron job each night that does something like "for show in db.select(shows): generatestaticpage(show)". I'd be amazed if the whole site was just one big Dreamweaver folder that gets published.
"We have a database engine. We have a template system. We have a language that everyone in-house knows. Let's write a generalized method for combining the three!"
I suspect that happens a lot more often than you'd think. If anything, I consider it a testament to the BBC that they've decided to release their code so that everyone else doesn't have to reinvent it.
Disclaimer: I much prefer Python, and to me the BBC is that extra channel that has "Coupling" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares". I have no special love for Perl or the BBC. I just think that it's pretty cool of them to do this and wish them luck.
Nice sig, BTW. :-)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Like most organisations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem; the BBC's is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files. This means that the vast majority of the BBC's website is statically published - in other words HTML is created internally and FTP'ed to the web servers.
And a couple of implication, including an effective hard limit on the number of files you can save in a single directory (many older, but still commonly used, filesystems just scan through every file in a directory to find a particular filename so performance rapidly degrades with thousands, or tens of thousands, of files in one directory), the inherent complexity of keeping the links between pages up to date and valid and, the sheer number of static files that would need to be generate to deliver the sort of aggregation pages we wanted to create when we launched /programmes; let alone our plans for /music and personalisation.
I really think the BBC is running without using a database, I wouldn't have believed it either but it's right there straight from the horse's mouth.
Nice sig, BTW. :-)
Ta (but you forgot the (PBUH) after the smiley face, you insensitive clod)
Re: (Score:2)
Make your mind up please?
If you have static content and a high load then a database is overkill.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's called putting all your eggs in one basket. When the language is no longer popular they'll be begging anyone with experience of it to join and trying to rewrite the entire monstrosity. Don't believe me? Think about Oracle forms. Half my job is replacing legacy code. What you're describing is a neat way of creating a HUGE le
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> easier than learning another language for one specific smallish project.
Sounds to me like a bunch of Perl coders looked at their friends' code and find their ideas interesting, and is worthwhile to implement in their favorite language. Why people never learn to admit that some people think Perl looks nicer than the language they love most?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
For most of the same reasons that make it hard to admit that their wife is an alcoholic or that their son wants to become a Hari Krishna. There are certain truths that make it difficult to believe in a rational society. Yours is one of them.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah! Especially HTML!
Re: (Score:2)
If you'd read the article[1] you'd have found out that they use Ruby on Rails internally, and that's why they replicated its functionality in Perl. The reason they did that was because they weren't allowed to use anything other than Perl.
[1] Hahahahahahahahahaha[gasp]hahahahahahah
"need" is the new "want" (Score:4, Funny)
This is just word-inflation. in the same way that children nowadays "need" a chocolate bar.
In business, the best way to see if someone really "needs" something is to see how much hassle they're willing to suffer to get it. For example, if they need a $1000 product, then I'd need a 20 page justification. If they need to attend a conference in 'Vegas, I need them to work weekends to catch-up the time etc. You get the idea.
Parent
Re:Madness, I say (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The best reason to use the existing technology is because you're currently using it.
They could do a bit in Pythin, and another bit in PHP with perhaps a snippet of RoR in there that someone did a prototype in to see if could replace the entire codebase (ha), with a couple of C modules someone wrote for some fast-access parts, maybe with a VB.NET module that was written by someone experimenting with the latest 'coolest' tech, and a slice of Java written by an intern once.
Or they could leave that k
Wow. A consultants dream (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Wow. A consultants dream (Score:5, Insightful)
And "job security" language choices is just as much a problem with regular employees as consultants. As a consultant there's been more then one occasion where I had to go and clean up the mess after some bored employee made an "interesting" language or framework choice presumably to keep themselves interested.
-- John.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it more accurate to say that Perl code is readable to the person that wrote that particular piece of code. Since there are a million and one ways to do anything in Perl (and this is considered a 'strength'), then when another Perl hacker comes along and can't understand what the previous Perl hacker did, they rewrite the whole thing the way they know how to do it. That doesn't meet my definition of 'readable.'
Super (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Super (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Conspiracy! (Score:5, Funny)
"Perl on Rails for Dummies"
"Perl on Rails for Idiots"
"Perl on Rails Bible"
"Perl on Rails in 24 Hours"
"Perl on Rails in a Nutshell"
"Perl on Rails: The Missing Manual"
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Conspiracy! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.packtpub.com/catalyst-perl-web-application/book [packtpub.com]
It's much better than the Rails books though
Don't get your hopes up (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Don't get your hopes up (Score:4, Funny)
Could be worse. Could be released under the TVL (TV Licence), where you'd have to pay £135.50 per year to run the software. (Or £45.50 if your web site is in black and white instead of color.)
The good news then would be that if you live in your parents' basement and they have a TV Licence paid for, you can host the web site under their licence as long as the server is located in your parents' house.
Parent
glark (Score:3, Funny)
As long as it somehow involves more and better Dr. Who reruns, I'm happy.
What? Their website? I want Dr. Who reruns on that, then. The ones with the curly haired guy.
Thanks a lot Beeb.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Never underestimate the insanity of the British Public Sector.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Sniff. At the very least, we'd feel better if others could learn that it's Perl and not perl.
$ is for scalar, @ is for array, # is for hash
Not so hard, was it? Notice the mnemonic qualities? Much of Perl has a striking resemblance to natural language, given that it's author, Larry Wall [wikipedia.org] is a trained linguist. For
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thanks a lot Beeb.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, to some degree. The primary goal of Perl, like other programming languages, is to communicate with other programmers. There appear to be two schools of thought on how to do this. One of them comes from the mathematicians, who appreciate simplicity and uniformity of expression (as least per their on definitions of both) as a primary design criterion. The other comes from the linguists, who (in my opinion) have somewhat better ideas of how people (not just mathematicians) really communicate.
I'm not saying that one is bad and the other is good. You'd never likely get the Turing model or the lambda calculus out of a linguist, for example, and COBOL and AppleScript aren't great examples of applying linguistic principles to language design either -- so there's a balance to strike between them.
I agree to some degree, but just because no one has ever done it perfectly doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Yes, actually. Remember that Perl is an artificial language, so it can simultaneously be more and less a pastiche than English. Consistency and syntactical similarity of semantics are important in natural language (avoid false cognates) but even more so in a programming language. The Perl 6 designers believe strongly that similar things should look similar and dissimilar things should look dissimilar. As well, concepts such as noun markers and subject-verb agreement (context) are present in Perl, as well as pronouns (topicalization). This brings up other problems such as ambiguous antecedents.
The designers evaluate new operators and concepts in terms quite heavily. Mnemonics are important, as well as the proper length of identifiers and semantics of their names. For example, Perl 6 uses say instead of println because we believe it will be a frequent operation -- more frequent than print and as such deserves a shorter identifier. Whatever the syntax for accessing the current continuation will be, it's likely to be somewhat longer, as it's not something we want people to need to use more than a few times.
Parent
Re:Thanks a lot Beeb.. (Score:4, Insightful)
% is for hash. And that's not really a good rule.
Given %hash, it's called @hash{@keys} when you slice it, and $hash{$key} when you only want one element. References always are scalar, so even though $foo->{bar}[42][2]{baz} is referencing a hash of arrays of arrays of hashes, you have a $ on the front.
Once you know the rules, it's fine... but it's not necessarily Perl's finest point (and this all changes in Perl 6 as a result). Even if you like Perl, you have to admit that there are lots of things wrong with it.
There are just less things wrong with Perl than any other language
Parent
But what is Rails standing on? (Score:5, Funny)
The developer gave a superior smile before replying, "What is Rails standing on?"
"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's Rails all the way down!" [wikipedia.org]
Time to domain-squat! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Surely the BBC of all organizations... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously though I dont know what the BBC is doing, smoking its way through £130m PA ($260m) of public money on computer "projects", like re-inventing mplayer/iPlayer/MediaPlayer.. Haven't we already done this? Shouldn't Aunty Beeb leave the hard-coding to the free market & concentrate on what it does best - artistic/jounalistic output?
Re:Great another framework (Score:4, Interesting)
IMHO another example of management red-tape costing developers time and resources.
Parent
Re:Great another framework (Score:4, Interesting)
Catalyst aims to be an extensible framework. Sure, there are recommendations for new projects, such as using DBIx::Class as the ORM, or Template Toolkit for your view, but these aren't written in stone. Each layer is flexible. You can use CPAN modules to build your own models and views. Want world GDP data? Make a model that calls WebService::CIA. Have your own custom database model already? Use it! (SixApart did this with Catalyst + their partitioned database system + Memcached).
Catalyst is a little rough around the edges for some of the simpler cases that you might use RoR for, such as a plain old CRUD form system, which Rails will nicely generate for you, but for more complex applications Catalyst is not a bad choice.
Parent
We need a story about Russian railroads (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Complain to your elected representatives, perhaps? Now THAT's thinking outside the box!