Web Framework Comparisons

The first three presentations compared different ways of developing web applications.

First, Mark Gardner demonstrated a relatively simple note-taking app developed with the Dancer web framework. He showed how Dancer simplifies making CRUD apps. He used Plackup to be the server that hosted the app. Although Dancer supports a number of different plugins, Mark only used Dancer::Plugin::DBIC. The result was quite functional.

Next, Julian Brown explored the advantages of developing on mod_perl2. The main thing to remember about developing with mod_perl is the matter of trade-offs. Mod_perl has much lower overhead than most other frameworks. He showed the different ways that mod_perl-based applications can be launched.

Julian's presentation is available.

For the final web development talk, Wade Johnson showed how a simple CGI script can work effectively when the volume of requests and simple behavior. This script was quite old and has a few security flaws, even though they could not have been exploited without detection.

Next, JD Lightsey described a security hack against the old suid feature of Perl.

Finally, Todd Rinaldo described some research into replacing Perl's hash algorithm with a Minimum Perfect Hash.

We had 9 people attending this month. As always, we'd like to thank cPanel, Inc. for providing the meeting space and food for the group.