BBC Creates 'Perl on Rails'

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."

Re:Conspiracy!

[jrockway]

Well, actually... there is a Perl MVC book on Catalyst:

http://www.packtpub.com/catalyst-perl-web-application/book [packtpub.com]

It's much better than the Rails books though :)

Re:Thanks a lot Beeb..

[chromatic]

... the notion that Perl "has a striking resemblance to natural language" is a dream of people who don't really know much about how "natural language" looks, i.e., non-linguists.

... and several of the other trained linguists who use and develop Perl.

Re:Madness, I say

[gbjbaanb]

absolutely.

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 kind of technology nightmare and stick to writing business applications that solve business needs and not the developer's current wet dream.