The most advanced web environment with DB access that I know of ist OpenInteract. See www.openinteract.org or sourceforge.net/projects/openinteract. OI is a full framework for developing web apps and uses a persistence framework called SPOPS, which lets you define an object type with transparent storage. If you do not mind passing the learning curve, this is for you. Documentaion is excelent and the author - Chris Winters, is really active helping out on the mailing list.

If you want s.th. simpler, you could go for the Template-Toolkit www.template-toolkit.org. This is a great template engine, which has tons of plugins. One is for directy accessing DBI datasources from whithin the template code.

Of course, these are not the only choices you might have, but the choices I made. You also might want to look at embperl, mason - www.mason-hq.org , and slash ( the stuff which runs slashdot ).

have fun reading all this ;-)

Andreas