RE: Perl Question

["Urbanek, Marty" <Marty_Urbanek@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

Perl is a language in itself, so I assume that your software package has
some components that are written in Perl and therefore needs the Perl
interpreter to run. Perl essentially gives you a super-powered shell
scripting language.

In my experience, if you have a portable application, it is likely that some
UNIX developers introduced the Perl parts because it is commonplace in their
environment and they would not bat an eye or think that it would be a
concern in any other environment, such as iSeries. I believe there was a
version of Perl supported by IBM in 5799-PTL, but I think IBM has (or will
soon) dropped support for that PRPQ. This is not to say that other/newer
Perls will not work on iSeries.

It is possible that the Perl parts are only for the install/upgrade, and
therefore may be less of a "production" concern for you.

Only the software vendor can answer those questions.

-Marty

------------------------------

date: Tue, 10 Feb 2004 08:50:20 -0600
from: "Wills, Mike N. (TC)" <MNWills@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
subject: Perl Question

In the requirements for installed programs for the upgrade for my
application, it requires that I install perl on my system. Now what confuses
me about this is that they aren't supporting tomcat because it isn't
supported by IBM. So does that mean that IBM does support perl on the
iSeries? I don't have all the details and will be asking more about why it
is needed, but it concerns me when I have to install this for a mission
critical application. My only guess right now is that perl is for the
command line utilities in qshell. 

Any thoughts?

Mike Wills