mod_perl marketing

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Perrin Harkins wrote :

| [...] [W]e have to face the fact that someone who knew enough about
| Perl and apache to write an embedded interpreter module still
| thought that mod_perl was some kind of limited CGI replacement.
| This means we are not getting the word out very well, and it's
| distressing.

Sad but true. Although I've yet to take that long-overdue deep dive
into MP2, I consider myself an experienced MP1 hacker (I wrote an HTTP
reverse-proxy in it, and also did most of the effort writing no less
than a web application framework - for those who can grok french or
can use the Babelfish, see
http://conferences.mongueurs.net/2004/talk/6). During those projects,
the only place where I saw it clearly stated that mod_perl is "program
Apache the way you like in Perl" instead of "CGI on steroids" is the
Eagle Book - which for the record, is an O'Reilly book titled "Writing
Apache Modules in Perl and C" by Lincoln Stein and Doug McEachern, and
the name "Eagle Book" comes from the fact that the cover animal is,
you guessed it, an eagle
(http://www.foo.be/docs/tpj/issues/vol4_3/tpj0403-0014.html). Even
*that* bibliographic data was a pain for me to retrieve from the
mailing list archive!

Online documentation on anything in the mod_perl guts is very, very
scarce, and I had to RTFS more than once even to perform basic
mod_perlish tasks such as writing a subclass of Apache::RegistryNG.
Even the Eagle Book itself is sub-useful in places (e.g. the infamous
ass_backwards stuff), and other parts of the Apache API visible from
mod_perl has to be guessed from the "writing Apache modules in [...]
C" section. At least this is how things were two years ago: now that I
am "in the know", I don't need documentation all that much anymore and
therefore my point of view could well be outdated.

On the bright side, you guys are doing quite a good job at keeping
mod_perl on the radar of many pointy-haired bosses, and I understand
that this marketing crusade cannot but take the CGI-and-performance
route when the competition is Java. Still, the techs out there hear
about mod_perl's true powers mostly through hearsay. What about
setting up some tech-oriented wiki to tip the balance backwards for
the rest of us? This would be a great place to link the press releases
to when MP2 final is announced.

- --
Dominique QUATRAVAUX                           Ingénieur senior
01 44 42 00 08                                 IDEALX

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