No offense, but your code template would be horribly inadequate for a template for me. What about warnings? What about taint checking? What if I'm running under mod_perl and need to use the OO CGI interface (you mostly use that, but you have ":standard" in your import list). My template was meant as an example of what you could do - it was known to be incomplete and/or wrong. I hacked it in about 2 minutes from the one I do use to make it begin to correspond to the style that the original poster wanted.

Just to make it clear: ANYONE WHO USES IT AS IS STUPID BECAUSE ITS INCOMPLETE AND PROBABLY BROKEN

As you noticed it has some OO inconsitencies. This is because I don't use mod_perl, tend not to OO my CGI scripts, and I failed to completely convert to OO.

There may be acceptable code templates out there and I'm not opposed to them, per se, but they should be used with thought and caution.

100% agreement - see more comments below

This guy was using code templates and just blindly followed them. The templates provided a generic constructor and AUTOLOAD. Rather than thinking about what he was doing, he was just blindly following orders.(My emphasis)

Templates are there to get you started. Slavish devotion to a template, like slavish devotion to rules or anything else is always a problem. Neither templates nor rules will make a barely competant programmer into a genius, but a template can help the next guy figure out what dumb error Mr lowgrade bozo just committed.

A template like the one I suggested makes it relatively easy to generate test cases and to break down the action into separately testable chunks. As someone who has spent much time debugging other people's crud, this kind of inbuilt modularity and testability I wish to encourage, hence my template.

Dingus

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