I did take a look at HTML::Mason, and was a bit put off by the intermixing of HTML and Perl. One of our goals is to separate logic and presentation. After a (somewhat superficial) perusal of the documentation, it looks like Mason couples these rather tightly.

I may be very wrong though. Thank you for your suggestion, I will look further into this :o)

You don't have to intermix HTML and Perl -- you just can when you need/want to.

You can also separate your application into some Mason documents that present data and others (or better yet, non-Mason Perl Modules) that hold the business logic and interact with your database.

Mason provides syntactic sugar to control the interface between the two and by allowing perl in your presentation layer, you have a great deal of power/flexibility in generating HTML.

Mason also allows nice modularity of various presentation elements and combining them in various ways to produce user interfaces.

One of our goals is to separate logic and presentation

You prolly dont want j2ee and that horible jsp stuff then.. ;-)

Implemented properly, you can make it fit the sort of model you are aiming for.

I didn't think Mason offered any direct support for separating business objects into a separate physical layer. I thought it all lived in the Apache process.

Am I missing something?

I didn't think Mason offered any direct support for separating business objects into a separate physical layer. I thought it all lived in the Apache process.

Am I missing something?

Yes. HTML::Mason is independent of apache. Sure it has great support to run on apache under mod_perl or cgi, but it doesn't require apache or any webserver.

Yes. HTML::Mason is independent of apache. Sure it has great support to run on apache under mod_perl or cgi, but it doesn't require apache or any webserver.

Yes, but does it have support for separating out business and presentation objects into separate physical layers?

I understand that Mason can be used independently of a specific web server, but (unless I'm missing something - which is entirely possible) it's still oriented around a single process. It doesn't have direct support for half your mason application living in one process talking to the other half of your mason application living in another process.

(I'm not saying Mason is bad, because it isn't. Just that it doesn't directly support this particular architectural model as far as I am aware.)