Do I need to use perl?

[MarkW]

I hope this is the correct place to post this:
I am developing a web site for a e-commerce business I will be
running. The site I'm setting up will be 50% store, 50% content. I'm
not sure which shopping cart I'll be using yet (am looking at
os-commerce and miva) but the other part will be content. I will be
writing reviews of products, articles on the industry, and someday may
have some blogging and forums and advertising. I have to add that I
am not much into programming and I want a good web site but most of
all what is important to me is ease of use and a easy to update web
page. I will be using Macromeda Studio 8 to develop it (dreamweaver
and flash)
As for perl, years ago I looked at writing web pages. I never did it
but remember back thing perl was the big thing. it was used for CGi
scripts. is it still used a lot? I seem to read about PHP a lot now.
Has that replaced Perl and are CGI Scripts still used?

 

[John Bokma]

I hope this is the correct place to post this:
I am developing a web site for a e-commerce business I will be
running. The site I'm setting up will be 50% store, 50% content. I'm
not sure which shopping cart I'll be using yet (am looking at
os-commerce and miva) but the other part will be content. I will be
writing reviews of products, articles on the industry, and someday may
have some blogging and forums and advertising. I have to add that I
am not much into programming and I want a good web site but most of
all what is important to me is ease of use and a easy to update web
page. I will be using Macromeda Studio 8 to develop it (dreamweaver
and flash)

Look for an application that runs on your website. Dreamweaver is more a
design tool IIRC so you might want to do the design work in DW, and
transfer the final design to the template system that such a web
application uses. For blogging you might want to check out WordPress, for
forums phpBB is very popular, but there might be better applications that
suit you.

Most shopping systems come with a CMS, and hence can be considered equal
to the "web application" I mentioned in the previous paragraph. Shopping
around (no pun intended) in the right places (hence not here) might help
you in the decision process.

As for perl, years ago I looked at writing web pages. I never did it
but remember back thing perl was the big thing. it was used for CGi
scripts. is it still used a lot? I seem to read about PHP a lot now.
Has that replaced Perl and are CGI Scripts still used?

I have no idea how you want to measure a lot. Slashdot is a very big
website with a lot of visitors and uses Perl. If you mean do a large
percentage of websites still use Perl for dynamic pages I am afraid the
answer is no. PHP has replaced a lot of Perl. Note that Perl is not
limited to CGI on websites, there is also mod_perl.

And recently Perl is probably replaced more by frameworks like Ruby on
Rails.

 

[MarkW]

Thank you for the response. I will do most research on off the shelf
e-commerce solutions and as well will look at the products you
mentioned.