I am trying to use mod_perl to create a website. I have previously done projects using PHP & Servlets and have some experience using perl on the command line.

I am finding the documentation online to be quite technical and am having trouble answering some basic questions.

If I want to use perl to generate the pages, do I need to tell httpd.conf to serve e.g. index.pl automatically instead of index.html OR should I set a handler for the location DocRoot?? (if i want to put dynamic content on the first page)

It is my understanding that I should have a handler or script called when a page is requested. This handler should then call a run() or init() function in another file or package where they can still access the request object. Is this correct??

For authentication I want to check the credentials against a database, do the Apache authentication modules have anything to do with this??

Can I use Apache::Asp in conjunction with mod_perl to embed my code into the html files??

If anyone has the code for an example site it would be very much appreciated

Thanks

Mark