in reply to
So Whatcha use perl for anyway?
Processing, management and distribution of scientific data:
- ingest : reading scientific format, extracting metadata, inserting into a database
- searching : SOAP front-ends to search the database (both client and server)
- browsing : web-based front ends to view browse products for the data
- federated searching : search aggregation to search multiple archives from a single interface, and query translation at each archive
- monitoring : making sure that the various processes (seem to be) running correctly
- ordering : user makes a request, we generate tarballs/zip files on the fly, or save to disk and notify them where it is
- reporting : generating metrics on usage (and some inputs need major cleaning first)
