A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
engineering.semantics3.com
A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
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Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#2I fully resonate with this article! For the last few years I've been trying to do the same thing and in the last 2 years I can say that we successfuly managed to create a similar thing using Perl. More than this we are developing all our web services with Mojolicious we are running them on top of Mesos using Docker. We use Module::Build for packaging the app and to be honest I find it more reliable than using any other tools. I'm gald to see that there's somone else who believes in Perl's abilities to deliver a modern application.
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#3I've just started tinkering with Mojolicious, after spending some time playing with a variety of other frameworks in other languages (I'm starting a new web project, and wanted to make an informed decision about how to build it). Mojolicious gets so many things right in such a tiny package, I'm surprised more folks aren't using it or talking about it.
The real-time support is awesome; setting up Websockets is stupidly simple; coding non-blocking services is, I think, easier (at least more concise) than in Node.js (though it uses a similar callback model); testing is just perfect (Mojo has a user agent and DOM support, so you can write super concise tests for web services); building multiple outputs (like HTML for humans and JSON for API) for the same routes is excellent. So far, none of the frameworks I've looked at has been as concise or as...neat, I think might be the right word. So many things about it have me saying, "Now, why didn't someone think of that earlier?"
It's pretty tightly focused on just doing a few things really well, so it's not like a Rails, or even Django, experience...you have to make your own decisions about what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM), front end (though because it is agnostic about front end, you can use whatever you like pretty readily...so, React/Redux, Angular, whatever), and even nitty gritty stuff like authentication and accounts and such. I occasionally find myself wishing it had a little more batteries included, but mostly I like that it doesn't take days of doc/code spelunking to grasp the whole system.
Anyway, I'm not a Perl fanatic, though I like the language OK; especially in recent versions. So many little warts have gone away in recent years. But, the web service ecosystem in Perl is surprisingly strong and modern, given how unpopular it seems to have been in recent years. It's been a while since I really dug into what goes into building a new Perl system, and a lot of cool stuff has been completely off my radar. Mojolicious, in particular, is one of those things.
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#4I've just started tinkering with Mojolicious, after spending some time playing with a variety of other frameworks in other languages (I'm starting a new web project, and wanted to make an informed decision about how to build it). Mojolicious gets so many things right in such a tiny package, I'm surprised more folks aren't using it or talking about it. The real-time support is awesome; setting up Websockets is stupidl…
> I occasionally find myself wishing it had a little more batteries included
Well, there's a lot of helper modules[1] on CPAN (somewhat different than the ones linked in the article), so that may alleviate that concern a little bit.
Mojolicious is bar-non one of my favorite Perl technologies. :)
1: https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=mojox&search_type=modu...
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#5I've just started tinkering with Mojolicious, after spending some time playing with a variety of other frameworks in other languages (I'm starting a new web project, and wanted to make an informed decision about how to build it). Mojolicious gets so many things right in such a tiny package, I'm surprised more folks aren't using it or talking about it. The real-time support is awesome; setting up Websockets is stupidl…
> I occasionally find myself wishing it had a little more batteries included Well, there's a lot of helper modules[1] on CPAN (somewhat different than the ones linked in the article), so that may alleviate that concern a little bit. Mojolicious is bar-non one of my favorite Perl technologies. :) 1: https://metacpan.org/search?size=20&q=mojox&search_type=modu...
Yeah, some of the modules are great. But, I mentioned my current paint point, which is user accounts. There's a couple of half solutions on CPAN, but nothing comparable to accounts support available in Rails or Django, or almost any of the other "big" frameworks. Admittedly, Mojolicious isn't really trying to be that kind of framework, and that's great...but, this one is such a common task. It feels weird to have to roll my own, if I want to make a somewhat traditional web application with it.
But, I agree...Mojolicious is a lot of fun.
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#6This is one of the first articles that clearly and consistently lays out the actual concrete benefits of microservices instead of the cargo cult Medium drivel that usually plagues the ecosystem.
(Of course, these are still only arguments for SOA and there's no clear differentiation between SOA and microservices, because there is none.)
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#7I fully resonate with this article! For the last few years I've been trying to do the same thing and in the last 2 years I can say that we successfuly managed to create a similar thing using Perl. More than this we are developing all our web services with Mojolicious we are running them on top of Mesos using Docker. We use Module::Build for packaging the app and to be honest I find it more reliable than using any oth…
In much the same way that PHP has a reputation for being "bad", Perl has a reputation (ill-deservedly!) for being line-noise, or obsolete.
I've continued to be productive by writing applications, microservices, and websites in Perl. Though these days it seems few people care to hear about the details as it isn't the flavour of the day.
Mojolicious is cool, although I've usually stuck with Dancer instead (which is itself a clone of Ruby's sinatra).
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#8This is one of the first articles that clearly and consistently lays out the actual concrete benefits of microservices instead of the cargo cult Medium drivel that usually plagues the ecosystem. (Of course, these are still only arguments for SOA and there's no clear differentiation between SOA and microservices, because there is none.)
The term SOA was poisoned by the baroque standards that spun up around it several years ago. There's nothing wrong with the concept of a service oriented architecture...but, when someone said SOA a few years ago, it usually meant something that was very "enterprisey", for lack of a better word (and enterprisey isn't a very good word, either). Big XML schemas, extremely complex APIs, etc. were the hallmarks of the first round of SOA stuff. At least, that's how it looked to me. I didn't work with it at the time; maybe it wasn't as bad as it looked from outside.
But, small pieces inter-operating is very UNIX-y, and excellent for all sorts of tasks. I think the difference between microservices and SOA may just be the direction it's coming from. Microservice architectures are coming from the Open Source web and cloud culture; SOA came from enterprise and government and finance. But, the over-arching concepts, I think are the same. (I'm definitely not an expert on either, however. Just my gut feeling.)
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#9It surprises me Perl isn't dead yet - in fact, German Bundeskriminalamt built a website for people having information about the German nazi hool riots during the France EM 2016 in Perl: https://www.bka-hinweisportal.de/
Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale
#10It surprises me Perl isn't dead yet - in fact, German Bundeskriminalamt built a website for people having information about the German nazi hool riots during the France EM 2016 in Perl: https://www.bka-hinweisportal.de/
Why would this surprise you? Perl continues to improve and is battle tested. More Perl is written today than ever before (that said, much more software in general is written than ever before, and there is no doubt Perl's share has declined). Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.