Live data from Hacker News

A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

engineering.semantics3.com

11–20 of 57 posts

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#11

It 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.

> Particularly if you're doing lots of text processing Perl remains a great choice.

And, when you get right down to it, a huge chunk of web dev falls into that category.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#12
post #3

I'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…

> what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM)

do you have something to recommend ?

used Rose::DB in the past, then I discovered SQLAlchemy and it's difficult to look back...

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#13

It 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/

Perl is bundled with many linux distributions and is a hard dependency for many popular programs. It isn't going away.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#14
post #12
post #3

I'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…

> what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM) do you have something to recommend ? used Rose::DB in the past, then I discovered SQLAlchemy and it's difficult to look back...

DBIx::Class is the only one I've really looked at. I also recall seeing a talk on Fey and Fey::ORM, given by the author, at YAPC or somewhere, and remember thinking it seemed really nice. But, I have never used any ORM heavily, so I'm still figuring it out.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#15
What's microservice-specific about that post? It's mostly about pretty standard perl packaging and deploying, most of which would apply to monolithic equally well (even more so, if your dividing line is DarkPAN-backed modules and not HTTP-isolated (micro-)servers).

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#16
post #12
post #3

I'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…

> what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM) do you have something to recommend ? used Rose::DB in the past, then I discovered SQLAlchemy and it's difficult to look back...

I'd need someone suggesting anything other than DBIx::Class to present some ironcast arguments for that choice

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#17

It 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/

Perl Just Works, it's fun to work with, and has either the same quality or better tooling that comparable languages.

Once you're used to Perl's testing tools, anything else feels chaotic and poorly thought-out.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#18
post #5
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Then why not put yours on CPAN?

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#19
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> what ORM to use (or not to use an ORM) do you have something to recommend ? used Rose::DB in the past, then I discovered SQLAlchemy and it's difficult to look back...

DBIx::Class is the only one I've really looked at. I also recall seeing a talk on Fey and Fey::ORM, given by the author, at YAPC or somewhere, and remember thinking it seemed really nice. But, I have never used any ORM heavily, so I'm still figuring it out.

With simple CRUD operations dbix works good. But for more complex queries pure dbi sql looks more good.

Re: A Perl toolchain for building micro-services at scale

#20
post #15

What's microservice-specific about that post? It's mostly about pretty standard perl packaging and deploying, most of which would apply to monolithic equally well (even more so, if your dividing line is DarkPAN-backed modules and not HTTP-isolated (micro-)servers).

You are absolutely right!

The post's equally relevant to a monolithic setup as well. In such a setup, a code artifact (as mentioned in the post) will probably just be a script or a library (now I include a service too).

A toolset like this is a good-to-have for a monolith but a pre-requisite for micro-services (if you want to reuse code as much as possible i.e.), I feel.

The post has been written from a micro-services angle because that's what the setup is like here at Semantics3.

Post reply on HN