In the first post I discussed the sick amount of functions in PHP compared to Perl, in the second one the reason why writing Perl applications goes faster and now in this third and final post, I'll discuss external connections.

Connecting to an other server is useful for a number of reasons, think about content scraping or posting messages to a website or forum. Both PHP and Perl have great support for this, but this time I think PHP wins the prize for being the most useful. This is a very strange thing to say because exploits etc are mainly written in Perl.

When you're connecting to a website in Perl, you can use LWP::Useragent, in PHP it's easier and you can just use file_get_contents("http://www.randombase.com"). These are only suitable for HTTP servers so not that useful.

As soon as you're trying something more advanced (IRC bot?) you need more powerful tools.  In PHP, the way to go is fsockopen(), this is an awesome function that is very easy to work with, it can work with virtually any protocol and gives you endless possibilities. The same goes for Perl's IO::Socket. This extension is maybe more powerful than PHP's, but for some reason I think it's unnecessary complex, there is too much information to be defined before you can actually use it.

So, my final judgement of this PHP vs Perl series would be Perl if you're writing something intended for personal usage or when you need to write a quick hack. I also think Perl is just candy for people who are good with advanced structures, because good and efficient Perl code is almost unreadable in the end. PHP is easier to pick up because of the enormous documentation (Perl's documentation is shattered on the web), and still the unbeaten king for developing websites.