[Nottingham] Career change + perl.

[Godfrey Nix]

On Tue, 2006-10-03 at 15:33 +0100, Richard Bagshaw wrote:
> As I was previously a PHP developer and a Perl developer I can safely
> say the better option is infact perl, in my opinion perl is much better
> and is infact much more flexible, also if I compare perl with php
> salaries I would have to say that perl is by far the better choice ;-)
> 

I agree. I have been working on a development over the last couple of
years that follows many of the current thoughts in programming -
"Agile", Service oriented architecture, workflow, and business process
reorganisation and I feel that Perl is by far the better for this sort
of work than PHP. For one thing, writing in PHP permits the intermixing
of processing and HTML (it was designed that way!) far more than Perl
does. I want to keep the processing and the web content SEPARATE! (Yes,
I know you can fill a perl program with lots of large print statements -
yuk!).

This is my design:

Web interface  ------- process sequencer  --------   business routines
   |                         |                          |
HTML template(s)          XML workflow definition    base functions

All except for the templates and the XML file are written in Perl. The
web interface and process sequencer are totally generic, as are the base
functions (read job status record, connect to a database, send an email,
print a document, etc). All that is needed to change the behaviour is to
write any new business routines, and describe in the XML what rules to
call those routines. It takes all those horrible long lists of "if
condition do subroutine" away from the program and makes it more
flexible. Every business routine does one small, well defined, part of
the whole process.

Regards,
-- 
Godfrey Nix <godfrey at gnnix.co.uk>