What criteria should I use to evaluate a Perl “app server” (mod_perl replacement)?

Question

Short version:

What criteria should I use to evaluate possible candidates for a Perl \"app server\" (mod_perl replacement)?

Answer 1

I think you've already identified what you need to know and what to test: execution time versus memory. You also need to evaluate the flexibility and ease of deployment that you get with mod_perl and the big win of preserving the usefulness of software you've already developed (and the accumulated experience of your staff). Remember you can easily separate services by CPU and machine if your new front end is going to be talking to your applications inside your own network. A lot depends on how "web-ish" you can make your services and if they can be efficiently "daemonized". Of course there's lots of ways for web front ends to talk to other services and perl can handle pretty much all of them ... TIMTOWTDI.

Since you mention "tuits" (i.e. "manpower") as a constraint, perhaps the best approach in the short term is to set up a separate apache - mod_perl instance as an "application container" and run your applications that way (since they run well that way already, is this correct?). After all, apache (and mod_perl) are well known, battle tested, and eminently tweakable and configurable. The deployment options are pretty flexible (same machine, different machine(s), failover, load balancing, cloud, local, VMs) and they have been well tested as well.

Once you get that running you could then begin experimenting with various "low manpower required" approaches to magically daemonizing your applications and services without apache. Plack and Starman have been mentioned, Mojolicious:: is another framework that is capable of working with JSON websockets etc (and Plack). These too have been well tested but are perhaps less familiar than mod_perl and Apache. Still if you are a perl shop you shouldn't have difficulty working with these "modern" tools. One day, if you do end up with more resource, you could build out a sophisticated networked platform for all your perl based services and use all the cool "new" (or at least newer than mod_perl) stuff on CPAN like POE, Plack, etc. You might have a lot of fun developing cool stuff as you solve your business problem.

To clarify my earlier comment: Ubic (see Ubic on MetaCPAN) can daemonize (and thus precompile) your perl tools and offers some monitoring and management facilities that come for free with the framework. There is one Ubic module available designed for use with Plack called Ubic::Service::Plack. In and of itself Ubic does not provide an easy solution for your new Java/Swing application to talk to your perl applications but it might help manage/monitor whatever solution you come up with.

Good luck and have fun!