Maclir has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This is not a question on Perl usage, rather on using Perl to develop a good dynamic (as in data base driven) site. I am working at a government department, and we want to provide Internet access to some of our systems, to let clients query and in certain situations update data. Nothing (yet) as secure as on line banking, but we want reasonable protection.

I have played around with CGI.pm, mod-perl, embperl, and dbi, and can develop various data base query and update pages. However, I want to incorporate user registration, and all of the usual goodies. I have looked at Slash and Zope (yes, I know it is Zope is Python, but I am not too prejudiced). These seem to be bulletin board / discussion servers - just like PerlMonks.

Are there any suggestions for other tools? I want to include data base acess to Informix (using DBD::Informix), which is our corporate DBMS, reasonable flexibility in the page layout, open source licensing, and so on. What have other people used?

Target server platform is Solaris (Sparc) 2.5 / 2.6, Apache 1.3.latest, Informix 7.

Thanks in advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Site Development Environment
by TQuid (Sexton) on Jun 27, 2000 at 06:36 UTC
    Check out mason. It features all the healthful goodness of Perl, but is significantly slicker than emb-perl, and compares very favorably with Zope, mainly because, well, it's Perl. Since it's Perl-in-HTML instead of Perl-with-HTML-stuff, so to speak, it's also much easier to get along with graphics design types who might faint at the sight of a few lines of code. Typically you put your HTML code with embedded mason stuff (it goes in the classic <% and %> tags), and the Perlish nitty-gritty goes at the bottom. --TQuid
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Re: Site Development Environment
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jun 27, 2000 at 08:03 UTC
    I've also used Template Toolkit with some success. (It's on CPAN under Template I believe.)

    (as a side note, eventually Jellybean will be able to do something like this. The Everything Engine which powers this site can also be configured to do similar things.)

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Re: Site Development Environment
by takshaka (Friar) on Jun 27, 2000 at 07:48 UTC
    As TQuid says, HTML::Mason could be what you're looking for. Or you may wish to build your own system on top of mod_perl with, say, Apache::Session and HTML::Template.

    PerlMonth has a series of articles on HTML::Mason, HTML::Embperl and HTML::Template which might help you in your quest.

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