use Perl

After a particularly brain-numbing hour attempting to persuade a development build of our main web site's Perl back end (on Debian) to actually run on a co-located RedHat Enterprise License server, I wondered aloud, with a degree of frustration, "So what the heck does 'Enterprise' mean, anyway?"

Our sysadmin, who is prone, like all of his ilk, to disparage any and all instances of rampant abuse of buzzwords, offered that it meant, among other things, 'very very slow, uses XML unecessarily, and comes with a default configuration that's no use to man nor beast'.

Mischievously (for reasons perhaps to be explained in a later blog entry), I suggested that that could be summed up in the four letters 'J2EE'.

One of my Java-savvy colleagues (in fact, all my colleagues here are Java-savvy) opined that that wasn't exactly fair, and that 'J2EE' wasn't really anything more than shorthand for 'go read this 400 page document on The Right Way To Do Things'.

Interesting.

I'm in the minority here at $CurrentEmployer, since I /am/ the token Perl developer. But this, and a whole load of other things, have got me wondering. Why isn't there a 'Perl Enterprise Edition'? Maybe there is, and I'm missing it? What would it be, anyway? Perhaps the question is, where's that mysterious 400 page document that tells us what it is?