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Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

The Future of Perl apparently resides on a JavaScript only site. What a weird world.

I work for Fastmail, and helped write Topicbox, the backend of which is entirely written in modern Perl. The frontend obviously uses JavaScript, and talks to the backend using JMAP (RFC 8620), which we helped to develop; Topicbox was using 100% JMAP well before Fastmail itself did.

Why can't the back-end of Topicbox do the JMAP stuff and then serve up some HTML? Beyond "because that's how we built it and it must be thus", it's quite hard to see why the front-end would need so much JavaScript to render nothing more than a chain of emails.

If you're just loading a single page, then yeah - it's pretty useless. If you're spending any time in Topicbox then the benefits of push updates and dynamic preloading pay off, and it's pretty lightweight as Javascript goes.

But yeah, in a perfect world where we had infinite time to develop it, we'd have the backend serve up a non-javascript static version of the content in response to direct links - if nothing else because it makes things a lot nicer for search engines - and then the javascript would load in and take over if enabled to allow you to keep moving through the site like usual.

> and talks to the backend using JMAP (RFC 8620)

FastCGI and mod_perl would have been a better choice.

JMAP operates over http and the backend http server is almost certainly PSGI based, which obsoletes both FastCGI and mod_perl as deployment approaches.

Thank you, I didn't know that. I was also being slightly facetious given the topic.

Just because you use Perl doesn't mean you can't use any other languages where appropriate. You don't need to be a zealot about everything.

Believe it or not, I am one of these people hurt daily by the modern web. I rely on accessibility to do my daily tasks, and accessibility is the thing that goes away bit by bit from year to year. I used to do Perl for server-side scripting, the classical CGI stuff. I know the war is over. But calling a disabled person a zealot is probably a bit overshooting, dont you think?

Perl is nothing if not pragmatic.

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