http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=622451

Dear Monks,

In case you are interested I thought I'd mention a Perl/PHP/Java contest that was held in Germany by the Free University of Berlin and reported by Alvar C.H. Freude on the Catalyst ML. Apparently Perl's the best! (Though there are some good Java programmers out there, maybe this isn't such a surprise.) Extensive PDF reports. Pros of the Perl teams: smallest code, easy to extend; see summaries beginning on pages 75 and 67 of the final report.

The results and final report of the Plat_Forms international web programming contest were published today. For each of the categories Perl, PHP and Java, three teams of three people each competed to produce a comprehensive "social networking" application in just 30 hours.

A short summary of the results: The Perl teams produced the most compact code and their solutions are very easy to extend. One Java team produced by far the most complete solution overall, the other two by far the most incomplete ones. The Java solutions are very hard to extend. The PHP teams used no autogenerated files, resisted SQL injection attempts and created the most similar solutions. There are also some pictures of the teams and you can guess what language they are using ...

And here is another post on it...

The results and final report of the "Plat_forms" international programming contest were released yesterday in a press conference in Nuremberg, and will be published today June 20th, 2007 on http://www.plat-forms.org/.

For each of the categories Perl, PHP and Java, three teams of three people each competed to produce a comprehensive "social networking" application in just 30 hours.

Team Etat de Genève / Optaros was declared winner of the Perl track. The Geneva solution, based on Catalyst and DBIx::DataModel, was especially praised for its compactness. However, other Perl solutions by "plusW" (Germany) and "Revolution Systems" (USA) were very close, and it was hard for the jury to decide. The report notes that compactness and extensibility are consistent qualities of the Perl solutions.

For the Geneva team, that was a really instructive experience. It confirmed that we work with the right technology and skills ... but also showed that we still have some progress to make as a team in the priorization and quality insurance processes!

See http://www.plat-forms.org/ for the complete report and for many interesting observations on these 3 development platforms. A detailed report of what happened in Geneva team is published on http://www.plat-forms.org/2007/blog/archive/2007/01/29/journal-of-team1

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Plat-forms Perl SNS platform comparison
by Jenda (Abbot) on Jun 21, 2007 at 13:22 UTC

    Well, I did not read the whole final report yet, I skipped some sections, but I would not exactly say it Perl is apperently the best. It was the best in some aspects and not so good in others. I think it did not do as well as expected, while the other two did better than expected (all expectations mine of course). I believe there's a lot to learn from and improve in the frameworks for the next round (and for actual projects). As it is, I'd say we failed :-( Even though it seems, that if the project was for 40 instead of 30 hours and/or included some "OK, guys, this and this and this should be changed" anounced sometime later in the project, the Perl teams would do much better.

    I guess we'll see a lot of "this comparison is not fair because ..." and "you should measure this and that" and "this is completly irrelevant, but ..." posts all over the net for some time now :-)

Re: Plat-forms Perl SNS platform comparison
by xdg (Monsignor) on Jun 21, 2007 at 13:14 UTC
    Apparently Perl's the best!

    For some definitions of "best". From the summary powepoint as well as the long report, a couple of observations:

    • Requirements completion by the nine teams, in order from best to worst: Java, PHP, PHP, PHP, Perl, Perl, Perl, Java, Java

    • Perl platforms had generally more security issues than PHP.

    • Perl teams struggled with web services (SOAP/WSDL) requirements.

    That said, I'd bet the Perl community could address shortcomings discovered faster than other communities...

    -xdg

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Re: Plat-forms Perl SNS platform comparison
by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Jun 21, 2007 at 12:28 UTC
    mattr,
    While you certainly provided more information than zby, this was already posted at Plat_Forms report published. It may have made more sense to reply there. This post just serves to link the two. Thanks!

    Cheers - L~R