Day: January 20, 2005

I’ve been looking at the Java servlets stuff for a couple of days now and it’s clear that it bears a remarkable similarity to mod_perl.

• In mod_perl, you define handler() which gets passed a $r object to deal with the request and send a response. Servlets make things a little more explicit. You make doGet() or doPost() methods, which get passed separate request and response. But they’re basically equivalent to $r.
• mod_perl and servlets both have filters, but they work in slightly different ways. servlets are much more explicit; you have to forward the call on to the next servlet when you’re done. mod_perl handles things nearly implicitly (with help from Apache::Filter).
• mod_perl is exposing the apache httpd API so you get access to different request phases. servlets run in a completely different environment, so that just isn’t applicable to them.
• Whats also incredibly similiar to both pieces of software is that most people think that they’re far too low level and have come up with higher level “frameworks” on top. The standard one for Java appears to be JSP, which on close inspection bear a marked similiarity to HTML::Mason. As with mod_perl though, no one framework covers everybody’s needs, so there are lots of similiar, competing ones.
• One thing that’s markedly different between the two is deployment and configuration. Most mod_perl deployments tend towards the messy, unless the application is packaged up like a CPAN module. But configuration is always manually done. Servlets come with a nicely defined “deployment descriptor” (aka “config file”—they love big words in the Java world). In addition, there’s a standardised directory layout and packaging format making it easy to deploy your application. In theory. I haven’t actually got as far as deploying an application in a production environment yet, but it looks reasonable to me.