Hello Monks!

I'm integrating two sets of code, one written for a Dancer web app, the other for CGI.pm. There's core code in the Dancer app that runs, and then the request parameters are parsed, the appropriate modules loaded, and the route-specific code is run, returning either a data structure (Dancer app) or printing to STDOUT (CGI.pm code). The content is then rendered in a template that also has page header, footer, navigation, etc., generated by the Dancer app.

I'm running into various problems because of the way that the CGI.pm-based code is written, e.g. some of the modules auto-export all their functions into the global namespace, most of the modules initialise a load of request-specific variables on load, there are function name clashes between modules, and most were written without warnings (and some without strict mode) turned on. From my understanding of the way Dancer is operating, the Dancer app stays alive between requests, so the CGI.pm modules really need to be reloaded to reinitialise these request-specific variables. Additionally, some of the functionality in the CGI.pm modules takes a long time to execute (it was written before the days of AJAX) and might be better dealt with by presenting a 'loading' page in the UI and retrieving the data via javascript when it is ready.

Is there a way to temporarily / safely execute the CGI.pm-based code within the Dancer framework without running into the issues above? Some kind of sandbox around the code, like a big eval but which also prevents namespace pollution (and ideally "unloads" the modules after use)? To recap, I'd like to:

• load old modules without namespace pollution in the Dancer app (???)
• override various functions, e.g. using Sub::Override (OK)
• capture STDOUT into a variable (OK)
• pass in objects (session, environment, etc.) from Dancer app, some of which (e.g. the session) will get modified by the CGI.pm app (mostly OK)
• fork a new process or deal with long-running processes asynchronously (not yet)

Apologies if this is not clearly enough described. I can provide more detail if helpful. Thank you in advance for any suggestions!

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