Cameron Laird's personal notes on architectures for Perl use

I launched this page to support readers of our SunWorld Online article, "Putting Perl together". We've written a number of other pieces on related topics that might interest you.

Dru Nelson asked

Do you know of a Perl tool that lets you embed perl in html files for dynamic pages?
For example, you would edit a file. It would look like html. However, within certain tags, you could embed perl for the dynamic content. I would like it to be CGI, if possible.

The answer is, yes, I do know of several such tools, including

freely-available ePerl,
emPerl,
YAWP,
Mason,
Velocity Engine for Perl, a commercial offering from Binary Evolution, and as of the second half of 1998,
QML. As of the end of August 1998, QML works with mod_perl.

Several commercial HTTP servers (including Netscape's and IIS) now provide a variation on this theme. It's possible that there are still other works that do much of the same; I've certainly heard of many people who started such projects "internally" for specific ends. Moreover, there are multiple variants in the Python and Tcl worlds, which I know better than Perl. [Also available for PHP, Scheme, ...] The "CGI Programming MetaFAQ"'s pointers on Server Side Includes are also pertinent here, along with gtml, which aims only to be a pre-processor for HTML.

I often argue that scripting should have a special place in the hearts of system administrators. Architecture 7. of the SunWorld article hints at that. Ed Finch gives a few more examples of Perl's capabilities in this regard.

Uri Guttman courteously improves the article in several small technical regards in a Usenet posting.

Cameron Laird's personal notes on architectures for Perl/[email protected]