From Perl slacker, to Perl hacker: Perl in the cloud, Part II

Cross-posted from Phillip Smith

Perl hacker Phillip Smith taunted us about the lack of Perl support; but more than our investor’s money, the real keys to the Perl stack have been the very insightful feedback and ideas of another major contributor to the Perl community: Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.

Sometime last week, while I was basking in the glory of my thirty-eight birthday, I got the best birthday present ever. “A beta account on dotCloud to try out their new Perl support,” you ask? Nope. The real gift was getting called a ‘Perl hacker’ in the same sentence as Tatsuhiko Miyagawa.

Seriously, though, a lot happened in the last week, and I was too busy slacking off to catch it until now.

For starters, dotCloud announced support for Perl (also on HackerNews) on their PaaS platform (thanks, Miyagawa! And, congrats on the new gig!). This is great news, and the Perl community has been quick to kick the tires; real Perl hackers have already tested several Web application frameworks on dotCloud:

• Mojolicious in the cloud: Hello DotCloud!
• Catalyst in the Cloud
• Dancing on a cloud made of pearls

Solomon Hykes, a dotCloud developer, noticed the same thing and mentioned it on HackerNews.

It gets better, however.

Yesterday, Active State announced their own foray into the clould, with the developer preview of Stackato for Perl and Python. The Active State cloud is reportely built on top of Cloud Foundry, a VMware initiative that calls itself “world’s first open Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering.” (Emphasis mine.)

Meanwhile, the mystery Perl PaaS provider Phenona continues to push forward and tweets that they are starting to pick up the pace on getting beta invites out.

So, from zero-to-hero, Perl now has at least three PaaS providers to choose from. It’s a great day, and it is really quite amazing how much can happen in a few, short, weeks.

I guess I should get on with writing my next cranky post: this time about Perl support in CodeMirror.

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