tommy's scratchpad

I’ve toyed with many different programming languages, development environments, application approaches and the like, and thus far I can be categorized as a REST and Perl hack. Perl is very dear to me. I used Perl for the first major project in my career and in a slew of other applications, including owsview.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been moving to Java (servlets, JSP, etc.) for webapps, which has been successful for the most part, but haven’t budged from a scripting point of view from Perl when I needed something really lightweight and quick and dirty.
Until now. Enter PHP.

I took on a (non-geospatial; well almost, I used geocoder.ca to geocode addresses, and output the newsfeed as GeoRSS 🙂 ) web project this year for a friend, which I initially developed as a bunch of webpages and Perl CGIs. Worked fine. As time went on, I wanted to abstract things much more, and get heavy into templating, and did I mention I needed to have this done yesterday? So I looked for Perl templating systems.

I ran into Template Toolkit, which looked like a viable solution at the time, but I found it a bit confusing as to which approach to take (tt has both offline and real-time template processing).

I then checked out Mason, which I have used sparingly in the past, and got a bit farther along. I have a slow machine, so the mod_perl include in my Apache config looked to be bogging down the server.

Finally, I looked at PHP, which I was familiar enough with from when we initially developed cwc2 (thereafter chameleon) in 2002. I already had a PHP install (to run this blog), and it seemed I needed a couple of more options built in, so a recompile/install did the trick.

From there, things went ridiculously fast. All the Perl code was migrated to PHP in a matter of a day (if I didn’t use Perl strict, most of it could have went untouched). And the templating. In a day, I had templates of templates. Very turnkey. And driven by one config file.

If you’re looking for a ‘but’, I’m afraid I don’t have one. We now have an abstracted product which can be deployed with minimal configuration. All thanks to some PHP.

I’m sure I haven’t even scratched the surface of what can be done, but for a simple, easy to maintain webapp, PHP has done the job. It would be interesting to hear what others use when they really want to bang out a webapp. At any rate, three cheers for PHP!