in reply to CGI made me bloated

From the CGI manpage: 

BUGS
       This module has grown large and monolithic.  Furthermore it's d
+oing many things, such as handling URLs, parsing CGI input, writing H
+TML, etc., that are also done in the LWP modules. It should be discar
+ded in favor of the CGI::* mod­ules, but somehow I continue to work o
+n it.

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I suppose the next question is: what's being done about it? Are the CGI::* modules a straightforward attempt to replace CGI.pm?

conv

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Re: Re: CGI made me bloated
by Arguile (Hermit) on Oct 31, 2001 at 06:53 UTC

    I'll bite. I think CGI takes on a bit too much as well. I love it's form handling, but it continues on way beyond the CGI. I'll keep using it for a couple of reasons though, the primary?

    I don't know enough to confidently evaluate the alternatives:

    This is just a partial list of the CGI namespace that deals with it. Some of them don't seem to be actively maintained (rather important). Is one of them a stripped down/refactored CGI.pm? How much testing have they gone through? CGI.pm is part of the standard distribution, should another become the de facto standard?

    If Mr. Stein were willing maybe a group could help him factor the code out into some subclasses and have CGI.pm inherrit from them (for backwards compatibilty). This (to my rather unknowledgable view) would seem the best of both worlds. It would stay a standard while those wanting a lighter weight solution could use a base class. From what I understand thousands of development hours in writing and lots of testing went into CGI.pm. Even thinking of throwing that away seems criminal.

    Update: Perhaps that "Even thinking of..." was a bit too much hyperbole. What I really meant was just abandonning the code base instead of exploring the possibility of refactoring is criminal. I agree completely that it is way too much bloat especially in a "typical" CGI environment (w/o mod_perl or the like).

[reply]
      Cobol has had many more hours and testing thrown at it, is it criminal to program in Perl?

      Personally, I cut and paste 20 to 50 lines out of CGI.pm that I actually use into my CGIs, and leave the rest where it belongs... in a library on the disk, rather than parsed and compiled into my RAM. (even parts that aren't compiled take up cache space, to get started, so there is no way around extra resources being gobbled)

      But then, I'm not using it for HTML generation. I use HTML for that... along with HTML::Template of course. For people writing a CGI, most of CGI.pm is bloat, unless we've forgotten what "CGI" means. I think 90% of it should be split off into something like HTML.pm. Of course, momentum is going to prevent that, which is why I cut and paste a few functions... muchly that means the encoding and decoding functions...

      The good news is, since we should usually be using mod_perl anyways, Apache.pm doesn't suffer bloat in the same way.
      --
      Snazzy tagline here

[reply]
        Mod_perl is nice, but it isn't portable. CGI.pm is. Hard as it may be to believe, Apache *isn't* the only web server on earth.
[reply]
      CGI::Lite can be used in place of CGI if you're only using it to get at form options (and just printing out hand-carved HTML). I've used it myself and it's a fairly good, stable module to use w/o CGI's bloat.

      --
      $Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

[reply]

In Section Meditations