In the process of attempting to install some of our web based intranet business applications (using Apache+CGI Perl+MySQL) in companies with very few, low end computers (typically 1-5 computers running Win9x), I found to my disappointment, that performance is way too bad.

After a lot of attempts to improve performance, I started evaluating the possibility of a Win32 native interface, using the same PERL back-end code. Luckily, I found some interesting tools that speeded up Win32::GUI development, and I am beginning to get much better performance due to the lowering of load on the server.

Here's what I use:

1. The GUI Loft
   by Johan Lindström is an excellent VB work-alike that for designing GUI forms. It creates a Dumped version of the GUI, which you can load up using couple of lines of PERL code (see above URL for details).
2. Johan has also designed another Win32::GUI app called Oasis which works as a neat code and POD browser.
3. I am still using HTML to create outputs (reports, listing etc), for its much easier to format these in HTML than in Win32::GUI. The easy way to do this is to save the HTML to disk and invoke the browser. A neater, but not as easy alternative is to use DDE.
4. PERL has several Template interpreting tools to help generate HTML outputs. I've tried HTML::Mason and Template-Toolkit and settled for the latter - its really neat.
5. Data is stored in MySQL on one of the machines, and called via DBI.

Hope this helps...

- Ashutosh