[TriLUG] Question about webapp design philosophy

[Michael Alan Dorman]

Mike Helms <Mike.Helms at martinmarietta.com> writes:
> Is there a reason not to do this?  I'm laying the groundwork now for a new
> webapp that I'm going to build, and this has certainly given me cause to
> rethink my design philosophy.

In addition to someone else's comments about maintenance issues, if
you're talking about an interepreted, non-persistent implementation,
you will get *slaughtered* for performace.

I, for my sins, have just inherited an idiotic implementation of an
application done as a 1MB perl script.

The damn thing takes forever to load and parse, and as a result of all
the other poor coding practices, it can't even be run under mod_perl,
where at least those issues would be taken care of.

I much prefer libraries of code for most "heavy lifting", with short
bits of code implementing particular interactions, coupled with some
sort of templating language for actual presentation---something akin
to the classic MVC design.

Making libraries out of your code can also greatly simplify testing,
and allow for the creation of alternate (command line, GTK, whatever)
interfaces.

Mike.