You mean a "simple HTTP server"? Like, say, HTTP::Server::Simple ? ;-) It is quite easy to use and is quite easy to plug your code into. I gave a (German) talk on it, and thanks to a cool trick ysth taught me, the goofy English translation of the slides is also available. The Perl code suffers a bit from it, though - the use cousin pragma has fallen out of favour except in the midwest I think.

Is there any particular reason why you need to use a web interface rather than a more traditional GUI using, say, Tk or Win32::GUI or whatever the toolkit du jour is?

/J\

I don't know about you, but I've noticed that browsers are a toolkit du jour ;-)

Need is a strong word. It is more a question of speed given time constraints and my background. Tk is great, and I used to program with it often.

Here's how far I got, a module (based on HTTP::Daemon) to set up a simple framework for you to define the flow of these types of programs (since now you've gone somewhat stateless), ServerApp

And my "sample app" thats a font browser using imagemagick for rendering: FontPreview

Thanks, I used the following code:

 sub handle_request {
     my ($self, $cgi) = @_;
     
     my $action = $cgi->path_info();
     $action =~ s|^/||;
     
     # ensure action exists or set it to default
     if(! $self->can($action)) {
         $action = "home";
     }
     $self->$action($self, $cgi);
     #print $out Dumper(%ENV);
     

 }
[download]

It is pretty neat. This makes it easy to use the MVC design pattern. I use HTML::Template to print all the pages out.