I am building my web applications with CGI, CGI::Application, CGI::Application::Session, CGI::Application::ValidateRM, HTML::Template, Data::Page, Mysql modules and I have a couple of questions reagading design and choice of modules:

1) Is it possible to change the name of CGISESSID variable when using the CGI::Application::Session or do I have to use CGI::Session to be able to change that? If my users don't accept cookies I need to add the sessionID to the querystring and I don't want to use the variablename: CGISESSID In the CGI::Session module I can easily change the name of the CGISESSID variable by:

CGI::Session->name("sid");

[download]
but I can't figure out how to do this with the CGI::Application::Session module. CGI::Application::Session is using the CGI::Session module so there should be a way of calling the name() sub routine, but how?

2) Are there any major drawbacks in using CGI::Application::Session instead of CGI::Session?

3) In my old shopping site scripts I always used a Shopping Cart DB table to keep info on my customers temporary shopping carts. However with sessions this approach feels unneccesary when I can store all shopping cart info. in a session variable instead. What is the most common way of doing this, how is the biggest shopping sites (amazon etc.) doing this? Pros and Cons?

4) Any information on what to do to make parts of my sites secure (https)? No clue about this! Where should I start, this might not even be a programming questions. I probably need some kind of certificate but do I have to buy a commericial one?

5) I am currently using the Mysql module because...well I don't really know why. Is there a reason to switch to the DBI module?

6) Is there any other modules that I should pay attention to when building my framework, such as: using the Template Toolkit (Apache::Template) instead of HTML::Template? any other tips?

In reply to Code Design Issues by boboson

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