Perl, Little-known Sixth Shao Lin Animal
April 17, 2000
- Now we have to pick an application (or a platform to build an
application) to store Bubba's data. We could be ultra-hip and
smart and use an ODBC datasource on an NT server, using ASP
with Generator to serve dynamically generated Flash Movies. That
would work great - and everyone would marvel at how fancy we
were - except:
- We are getting paid $1500 for the whole job, and there is no
budget for new stuff, so we couldn't purchase Oracle or Generator,
much less both.
- Bubba's host is Dizcountz R Us, Criminally Bare $4.99/mo plan.
(It's Apache on Linux); hence, forget about ASP.
- This is a small application, and it would be absurd to clobber it
over the head with all kinds of fancy, big-dollar crap.
So we decided, (you and I, on our way back from 7-11 where we
got bright-colored drinks), to use
PERL.
- PERL is great.
- PERL is free.
- You can learn PERL in your garage on Saturdays, (for FREE).
- PERL will run on anything – and it especially likes Unix/Linux (i.e. FREE) platforms.
- The standard development environment for PERL is WordPad, (which
is FREE).
- There is a huge, warm, welcoming community of PERL developers,
(who operate FREE learning forums).
- There is a huge canon of exceptionally good PERL apps that you
can download, install, and use for whatever you want for FREE.
- It is very easy to hack a free script to do what you want - even
with little or no programming knowledge.
- If you use PERL, you can tell people at cocktail parties, "I am
an open-source programmer," and score big buzz-points, (for FREE).
So PERL it is. So we could do one of two things here: we could
(gasp) write our own script that would work for this application
and this application only; or we could use a database script that
will allow Bubba to add other tricky functions to his site,
should he choose to. The latter could also be used to maintain
an HTML mirror of Bubba's Flash movie listings, (with very little
extra work).
Planning an Escape
Tricks & Data, Flash Yin & Yang
Make My Life EZ, DB
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