If you can't use hidden tags anymore but you still want the browser to keep all the information, you can resort to cookies. Check this if you're unfamiliar with them, paying particular attention the limitations in terms of number of cookies and size. They can matter if you carry lots of forms data.

There are many modules on CPAN helping you handling cookies, you definitely know CGI.pm as it's in the standard distribution, but I also like Apache::ASP.

Also keep in mind security implications of having the browser reporting the information (via cookies or hidden tags) as it can be easily forged and/or eavesdropped.

If you want to keep the information on the server side, you have many options. Apache::Session or Apache::ASP's $Session variable might be a good starting point.

If you want to write on your own files, you have to be very careful when yuo choose a file name, you decide whether a file name is shared among all sessions or it belongs to a single session, you have to thing about cleaning it up when a session ends (or after a certain timeout).

Many of these considerations (especially session cleanup, less problem with concurrent access) apply to database tables too. Perl has the wonderful DBI interface in this case. If running under Apache, Apache::DBI may help improving performance.

To keep it short, considering that you are a beginner, I'd suggest to use Apache::Session (or similar) or a cookie approach.

-- TMTOWTDI