Quoting David Dyer-Bennet (dd-b at dd-b.net): > What's servlet performance like? As you say, not relative to C; how > about relative to Perl, or PHP? Or Cold Fusion? Comparing the two > on the same platform of course. Having recently worked in Perl, PHP, and Java, I can tell you that they each have their advantages and disadvantages. As a developer, I usually key in on those aspects more so than performance differences on Apache between mod_perl, mod_java, mod_ruby, and mod_php. Essentially, their goals are the same: use one interpretor per httpd, reduce resource overhead, increase performance. What you use as a development language depends upon your need, your knowledge base, your resources, and ultimately, your preferences. Rather, it depends largely upon your customers' needs, resources, and preferences. Regardless, good programming methodology is the key to an efficient and fast web-based application. Personally, I like to separate application "layers" by their scope, and highly support blackbox programming. Still, I've recently seen the advantage to a more "ad hoc" approach. Java application servers such as Enhydra are perfect examples of a "black-box" approach to web-application design. Whereas PHP, JSP, ASP, and ColdFusion are perfect examples of an ad hoc, embedded approach to web-application design. Perl is somewhere in the middle; it can function like Java or it can function like PHP. Which will perform better? Depends on the application. For quick and dirty database reports, the embedded approach can be very fast to develop, but if the application needs to scale, you probably want to separate the database layer from the presentation layer a bit more. Pool your connections, result sets, and share data. There are ways to do this with just about any of the aforementioned technologies. What do you want to get your hands dirty with? Whatever you do go with, just remember that blackbox == your saving grace if you must scale things later... -- Chad Walstrom <chewie at wookimus.net> | a.k.a. ^chewie http://www.wookimus.net/ | s.k.a. gunnarr Key fingerprint = B4AB D627 9CBD 687E 7A31 1950 0CC7 0B18 206C 5AFD