Re: Future MPM Support? (...and future of mod_perl)

[Randolf Richardson <ra...@modperl.pl>]

> On 30.07.2018 03:51, Paul B. Henson wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 29, 2018 at 04:18:54PM -0400, Paul Silevitch wrote:
> >> Like Dr. James Smith, I'm hooking into multiple handlers and using filters.
> >
> > Yep, me too; Plack is really not a feature equivilent replacement for
> > mod_perl :(.
> >
> +1.
> Plack and other frameworks (TT2, Moose, Catalyst, etc.) cover the web application side, at 
> different levels and in different ways.

	And then there are CMS (Content Management System) solutions in 
other languages like PHP that get a lot of attention too.

	We have a very basic custom framework that we use for all of the 
internet sites that we maintain, and we'd had to adapt it as new 
versions of Apache HTTPd come along so as to keep up with changing 
APIs.  I suspect this isn't a unique problem to mod_perl though as 
there seem to be major changes for those moving from PHP 5 to PHP 7 
(as an example).

	It would be great to see something like Modx written in mod_perl, 
and also a good Wiki alternative to that commonly-used PHP one out 
there, and I think there could be an opportunity there since both of 
those seem to be locked in to a MySQL backend -- the opportunity 
being additional support for other databases, namely PostgreSQL.

	I also own the modperl.pl internet domain name, and I'm certainly 
willing to set up a directory there of such projects if anyone's 
interested.

	I do wonder sometimes if one of the challenges is that Perl has not 
had enough of its deserved visibility because many implementions 
don't seem to use a .pl suffix on the URLs (I've made an effort to do 
this on most of the sites I'm running that use Perl).  With other 
languages like PHP there's the .php suffix that's quite prevalent, 
and there's also .jsp (Java Server Pages) and others, and these do 
double as advertisements for their respective programming languages.

> But there is (to my knowledge) no equivalent for mod_perl's ability to interact deeply 
> with the Apache internal Request processing logic.
> In that respect, comparing mod_perl to Plack etc is like comparing apples to pears : not 
> very relevant.

	I agree, and I use those features myself.  ModPerl is very well 
suited to developing other protocols as well, such as a TelNet server 
(which may not be so great for Apache with regard to connection 
limits), or a NICNAME/WHOIS server (which I've done), or a Finger 
server, etc., which communicate over their respective raw protocols 
and don't utilize HTTP/HTTPS at all.

> Considering that, for better or worse, Perl as a programming language does not seem to be 
> really attractive to the current generation of software developers anymore, I would not 
> really mind if some tool equivalent to mod_perl was developed using whichever other 
> scripting language is currently more in fashion (javascript ? python ? ..), but it really 
> seems a pity to "slowly abandon" mod_perl without providing some tool of equivalent power 
> in terms of deep interaction with Apache httpd.

	Although I'm helping my 10-year-old daughter learn Perl as her first 
programming language, I have noticed that a lot of the post-secondary 
schools are teaching Python.

	I agree that it would be a pity to abandon mod_perl, full stop.  I 
also agree that it brings a lot of possibilities to Apache HTTPd that 
other languages don't.  If mod_perl were to be abandoned, that would 
probably be a major setback for Apache HTTPd as well, but a lot of 
people likely wouldn't notice, at least not for a long time.

	If I had to abandon mod_perl/Perl, I would definitely want these 
same capabilities to interject at various stages (and not just the 
authentication stages), and if it wasn't there I'd probably just 
write my own in Java or whatever is most useful to me at the time 
(and I know I'd be re-inventing the wheel to an extent, but it would 
probably be easier for me than writing an Apache HTTPd module in C).

	On the plus side, I am finding that mod_perl works very well and 
integrates seamlessly under Ubuntu Linux 18.04 LTS (64-bit).  I have 
been using mod_perl on NetBSD for approximately 2 decades now, and 
that's been getting increasingly troublesome, so I sense that perhaps 
the world transitioning over to Linux could qualify as something of a 
parallel to what we're concerned about here with mod_perl's future.

Randolf Richardson - randolf@inter-corporate.com
Inter-Corporate Computer & Network Services, Inc.
Beautiful British Columbia, Canada
http://www.inter-corporate.com/