shad sluiter wrote:
>
> I'm sure there are plenty of opinions about this one...
>
> I started learning Perl about a year ago to write typical scripts for a
> web site (guest books, chat rooms, search engines, discussion boards).
> I used Perl because my web host uses UNIX and perl was available, but
> have been curious about Java. One would have to live in a cave to not
> hear the Java hype in the media.
>
> Perl has it's nice points such as its text processing abilities that
> can split input strings into nicely managed lists.  I can see how it
> works with the cgi interface of my UNIX web server.  I do wish that the
> Perl syntax was a little more readable.
>
> My experience in Java is very limited, but I'm getting into a project
> to explore the possibilities of XML programming.  Sun seems to think
> that Java and XML are the "Ying and Yang" of cross-platform
> programming.
>
> Does anyone here use Perl AND Java and can list some strengths of
> each?  I assume Perl can perform XML decoding as good as any text
> processing language.  Any opinions on this issue?
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.
 
I my opinion, Perl is strength at regex, reporting and have nice co-operation with unix tool like GDBM and shell program like find so it the most useful tool to write admin script and act-ho stuff.
But when your program size getting larger and larger, perl code is really hard to manager and hard to write code in a team. As it don't have good object oriented programming support. Jave is a great OO language that is much better than C++ and perl with OO support. JDK provide much more useful library than perl, and the nice javadoc give you a very easy way to search and understand the library you want. May be java is my first language, but I just think that javadoc is better than perldoc and man page.
JDK provide a really mature internationalization and security support than perl, I feel that perl is hard to process Chinese text; and I still don't notice that there are any security framework in perl.
Sun have provide a very good website (www.javasoft.com) to organize java resource, similar perl have it great website www.perl.com, but I think that www.javasoft.com is better, because you can find nearly everything you want, but www.perl.com don't. (Of course, I know that there are many other website for both perl and java, but in general, I find resource I want easiler in java).
Java is much more superior in GUI development, but you may not care about this; I think that cross-platform is a big issue. Perl is really excellent in unix environment, but when I need to do some work or testing in Win32 environment, I get into a big trouble. Are you sure your code won't be port to other platform?
 
In short, I will use perl to script quick program that won't spend more than half an hour but I will use java to code for large project.