Yesterday I spent an incredibly frustrating day at work uninstalling and installing WebSphere. I am already shuddering at the thought of having to work with it further.

I do not understand specifically what Java/WebSphere and their ilk bring to my table that I can't do with Perl/CPAN/Catalyst/Apache/Perlmonks and for about $10000 and several Maalox less?

Then, a colleague tried to explain why I got that more than 1 GB worth of software installed through WebSphere. He said that as a "framework," it is supposed to give me all these components, all standardized, that I can call on to do all the little tasks that I would need to do in building a large application. Need security... use the security applet or EJB or whatever, need sessions, there you have it, need loggin, there you go, etc. (He didn't necessarily advocate all that, but he explained it)

Well, that makes sense, but I can still achieve the same thing via a standardized, single, authoritative copy of CPAN that everyone in my development team uses... kinda like (is it?) Morgan Stanley uses -- I remember a talk from OSCON 2003 titled something like "One Perl to Rule Them All" -- Morgan Stanley worldwide uses a single, canonical copy of CPAN available to everyone... that way everyone is using the same version of the same software everywhere.

Well, we can, however, marketing types are sold on "enterprise applications" backed by big, anonymous companies. They must be good because they cost a lot of money, and every other marketing type is talking about them.

Then, it strikes me (well, truthfully, I've always be aware of this, but it makes good storytelling) that Perl doesn't have marketing types. It has evangelists, and users, and support communities, but it doesn't have advertisements in Business 2.0, FastCompany, and Fortune, it doesn't have websites with Flash intros and no skip buttons, etc.

I was aware of P5EE, but that doesn't seem to be going anywhere. Searching on this site reveals two to three years old threads (P5EE - Perl 5 Enterprise Environment and P5EE ... get involved!) and even a post by the venerable tilly on why at least he doesn't want to get involved.

So, what am I asking here?

I guess, I am musing about other monks' thoughts about "Perl (5|6) Enterprise Environment (P5EE)", "Enterprise Perl Pods (EPP)", and "Perl Struts" or "Perl on Rails" or "Perl on Rollerblades." Do we need one? Why don't we have one? Maybe we have one but it is disguised like the proletariat!

I'll take your answers off the air.