WIRM
A Perl-Based Application Server
By Rex Jakobovits, Ph.D.
Perl is the language of choice for developing Web applications, serving over 90 percent of the Web's dynamic content. It's surprising, then, that none of the leading application servers is Perl-based. There are more than one million Perl programmers out there. Why should they have to learn Python to get the benefits of a server like Zope?
Perhaps the people who make application servers consider Perl's lack of strict type-checking a liability for large applications. Perl is "just a scripting language," they say, best used for quick-and-dirty programming. But experience shows that Web information systems are best built using such small, freestanding components, each of which encapsulates a limited chunk of user interaction. Clearly, Perl fits the bill in this regard.
Another reason for the lack of Perl-based application servers might be that Perl programmers have grown satisfied with the assortment of tools already at their disposal for building Web applications: CGI.pm for handling forms, DBI for connecting to databases, and 900 other modules in CPAN for solving every problem under the sun. With tools like these, who needs an application server? Indeed, Perl makes it easy to "roll your own" by piecing together custom code to manage session state, authentication, file handling, data access, and visualization.
At the Structural Informatics Lab at the University of Washington, we happily churned out ever larger CGI-based information systems for medical researchers. But we noticed that we were spending a lot of time rewriting the same code for gluing modules together and abstracting away low-level details.
