Again, not that any of them are not simple and easy to understand - but there seems a big difference in how much language you are overcoming in Java and PHP vs how much work you are doing. To me, the Perl version is doing the exact same work but is much cleaner and easier to take in at a glance. In the example there wordpress seems to have some difficultly displaying any indenting - but it’s there and makes it even more obvious, but even flattened it’s very very easy to see what all the attributes are instantly. As code gets more complex keeping things obvious like that becomes a great boon to maintainability.

It is interesting how BAD Perl's SDB interface is, and yet it is still by far the best compared to the others. However, with the forthcoming release of Net::Amazon::SimpleDB::Simple, pushing hashes in and out of SDB is utterly simple. Perhaps simpler than any of the other languages, although I haven't used Ruby's ActiveRecord SimpleDB hookup.