The Pros and Cons of Using Sybperl in 2001

[dave_aiello]

From a historical perspective, the Perl community owes a huge debt to Michael Peppler and his sybperl modules. I would argue that the original sybperl module almost single-handedly made Perl a viable development tool in the securities industry in the United States.

On the other hand, I am currently working on a consulting project in the securities industry where sybperl was used by default. Many developers are using sybperl because they heard about it by word of mouth. This would be fine, were it not for the fact that there is a lot of poorly-written sybperl code out there being used as templates for new development.

DBI may not support all of the DBlib and CTlib functionality in the most optimal way, but it is well documented. The fact that O'Reilly has produced an entire book on DBI is in itself a reason to choose DBI as a preferred interface.

Having said all of this, I suggest that the community invest heavily in further documentation, sample code, and tips on how to use sybperl. This would increase the likelyhood of successful use of sybperl as a basis for projects within corporations. When sybperl-based projects fail, they reflect badly on Perl as a development platform. The result is often that code is rewritten using Java, C/C++, or VB. This is bad for all of us, in the long run, and a luxury we cannot afford in this economy.

Dave Aiello
Chatham Township Data Corporation

[mpeppler]

*blush* ...Thanks...

I agree that writing a good script that uses the lower level library isn't as easy as it could be, and that there are quite a few pitfalls.
However, I have a feeling that most of these issues are related to the SQL side of things, and to an improper handling of result sets (which I think is the single most common problem) and those problems will be the same whether you use DBI or Sybase::CTlib.

You know the old saw - you can write bad code in any language :-)

I would be interested in hearing more (off-line) about any failed sybperl related projects that you know about (if you can share that information, of course). If I can improve on the documentation to avoid those sort of problems then I'd like to do that...

Michael