BBC Creates 'Perl on Rails' 216
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."
Wow. A consultants dream (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great another framework (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Madness, I say (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah! Especially HTML!
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. :-)
Re:Thanks a lot Beeb.. (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 the most part, it's those qualities that makes it easy to read and easy to write. And fun. But then, as with any language, there's often a widespread use of abbreviated forms of expression, or alternatively, idioms [wikipedia.org], the use of which, when used by someone who is skilled, trained, or otherwise knowledgable, is commonplace and second nature, but when encountered by a non-native writer or speaker of that language, are difficult to comprehend and require time and practice to master.
That said, for a language as powerful, widespread, thoroughly documented, and easy to learn as Perl, I do find it disappointing that it's popularity has been eclipsed somewhat over the years. Go Beeb!
Re:Thanks a lot Beeb.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:Surely the BBC of all organizations... (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:2, Insightful)
Re:Madness, I say (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.
Re:Holy Crap (Score:1, Insightful)
Seriously, Perl can be understood by anyone with a few brain cells, and once you open your mind for some new concepts, you'll find that it's much more concise and powerful than the competition.
Re:Madness, I say (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 legacy codebase for the future. Excellent for the programmer's job security. Not so good for the employer.
Re:Wow. A consultants dream (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.'
Re:Super (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Great another framework (Score:2, Insightful)
Have you ever tried to swap out ActiveRecord in its entirety for something else? The corresponding change in Catalyst is much easier than in Rails. (Rails 2.0 might have changed this; I don't know.) Rails is very proudly opinionated, while Catalyst goes to great lengths not to enforce any single particular component.
Nice synecdoche, but Auntie Beeb's programmers are really not the whole of the Perl community. Plenty of the Perl community doesn't care one whit for web programming, for starters.
slow whitelisting of CPAN modules (Score:2, Insightful)
- The code has not been released - so all the discussion is a bit void
- The reasons for it's development seem to be based on misunderstandings and 'white listing' of allowed modules (plus only Perl 5.6 allowed)
- It looks like Siemens, which in some way administers BBC working environment, is very reluctant to white list new CPAN modules - so the BBC developers reinvent on a grand scale.
If someone knows someone from Siemens involved in the whitelisting process - then please ask him why it is so slow and ask how the Perl community could help them to make it faster.Re:Super (Score:2, Insightful)
Additionally the expressiveness of Ruby combined with the conventions of Rails leads to comparatively little code, making it easy to change the app to take advantage of advanced deployment strategies like using memcached scaling the app even further.
So unless you can come up with concrete examples of unscaling Rails apps or arguments as to why Rails does not scale please keep quiet. Statements like yours without any arguments doesn't really provide much value, even if they are true. Thank you.