Re: Are we obsessed with CGI?

Personally I'm no longer working on CGI work, all the stuff I do is strictly back-end now. It still seems true that Perl is heavily used in the CGI field though, and this is as it should be since in the two years I did spend working in the CGI field I did see just how heavily text-manipulation features in the average CGI programmer's toolkit.

There are a lot of CGI questions here, yes, but I personally view this as a good point. If people are asking the chances are they're willing to learn, and if they ask here they're likely to be told more correct answers than if they'd asked elsewhere such as the numerous 'Beginning CGI' boards around the net. We don't want to see yet another generation of Matt Wrights here I think.

Ultimately people ask the questions, and post the articles, which they want to. The articles I'm most interested in are things like integration (XS, Inline etc), design and architecture (Design patterns, refactoring and the like), 'Perl tricks', and overviews of CPAN to point out the modules I may not know about. I'm still happy people post their CGI things though, since it's in no way stopping me from seeing what I'm more interested in, and they're often good reading anyway. Less CGI content wouldn't create more non-CGI content, I think.

I would like to see Perl used in a more widespread fashion and not just for CGI coding, but the fact remains that CGI is one of Perl's main fortes and is also where a lot of people 'enter the Perl world' and so have more questions. I would be curious to know what proportion of people here use Perl is various ways though!

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Re: Re: Are we obsessed with CGI? by nefertari (Chaplain) on Apr 12, 2002 at 11:52 UTC
To answer your last paragraph: I started not directly with CGI but with the problem to make a bilingual (German and English) website (a preprintserver and information about a research group) and to keep the information on both versions consistent. After some selfmade formats we ended up with XML (and XSLT as page generation language (all pages are static, since they change only once a week) so for that no perl was needed). A while later, we needed a searchfunction for the preprints, which I wrote in perl, so that was the CGI-part. Now I have some additional scripts, one which generates a part of the announcement email (only a part, because there is always some personal stuff in it), and the last thing a perlscript to make a list of the abstracts of the preprints, with an index by author, which is in LaTeX. And at home i wrote a small program together with my sister (her first programming experience in 10 years!) that helps her to cut sequences of letters (usually DNA-sequences), it is very primitive and cuts at the begin and the end.	[reply]

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Re: Re: Are we obsessed with CGI?
by nefertari (Chaplain) on Apr 12, 2002 at 11:52 UTC

I started not directly with CGI but with the problem to make a bilingual (German and English) website (a preprintserver and information about a research group) and to keep the information on both versions consistent. After some selfmade formats we ended up with XML (and XSLT as page generation language (all pages are static, since they change only once a week) so for that no perl was needed).

A while later, we needed a searchfunction for the preprints, which I wrote in perl, so that was the CGI-part. Now I have some additional scripts, one which generates a part of the announcement email (only a part, because there is always some personal stuff in it), and the last thing a perlscript to make a list of the abstracts of the preprints, with an index by author, which is in LaTeX.

And at home i wrote a small program together with my sister (her first programming experience in 10 years!) that helps her to cut sequences of letters (usually DNA-sequences), it is very primitive and cuts at the begin and the end.

[reply]