Developing Web Applications with Perl, memcached, MySQL® and Apache

Introduction

Web Application development has changed a lot in the past ten years. Now there are so many new technologies to choose from when implementing a web application, and so many ways to architect an application to get the most optimal performance.

One of those technologies is memcached, a high-performance, distributed memory object caching system that you can use as a front-end cache for your applications to store data you would otherwise have to access from a database. This has been a great boon to numerous companies looking for ways to gain performance without having to spend a king's ransom — now affordable commodity hardware can be used to run memcached to simply provide more memory for application caching. Before, the focus would have been on how to get more power (hardware) for database servers.

Then there is MySQL, the world's most popular open source database and a full-fledged relational database management system. MySQL has advanced greatly in the past ten years, providing many fine features that you, as a web developer, can take advantage of. MySQL came into being during the advent of the World Wide Web and, in fact, was the database of choice for many web applications. Thus, it was a major factor in the very growth of the World Wide Web. Both MySQL and Linux evolved and became popular because of the Internet and were innately well suited for web application development.

A technology that isn't so new but is still very pertinent is Perl. Perl is an incredibly versatile ...