I'm stuck with getting the STDOUT buffer to flush for a web app i'm writing. here's the issue:

i have a script that instantiates display objects, then prints out the results. let's call it index.cgi

index.cgi basically does this:

my $page = DisplayModule->new();
my $html = $page->build_page;
print $page;
[download]

not much processing there.

the display module makes some decisions about what page to build, then build them, collecting all of the HTML ( to be later printed by index.cgi )

one of the methods in DisplayModule ( that gets called by the build_page routine ) needs to print some 'status messages' out to the screen before the HTML is rendered. but the print statements live in another module, let's call it Debugger.pm

so in DisplayModule->build_page, an new Debugger is created. something like this:

sub build_page {

    my $self = shift;

    #### the usual arg processing, etc

    my $debug = Debugger->new();
    $debug->debug_it();

    ### gather up more info, stick it into the $html var

    return $html;

    }
[download]

• I've tried setting $| = 1; ( and tried the shorthand  $|++ )
• I've tried  syswrite( STDOUT, $message, length($message) );
• I've set $| in all the associated objects. . .( in this case, index.cgi, DisplayModule.pm, and Debugger.pm ) but i still have the page hang, wait for object instantiation, wait until the browser has received the entire page, and then i get 'rendering' -- even though the debug messages are just plaintext, and shouldn't be rendered.
• I've tried writing a function ( force_print ) which takes a message from Debugger.pm and turns it into a call to  syswrite.

but none of these give me the desired behavior -- status messages on STDOUT ( the client browser ) while the html is being gathered by the rest of the program.

is there something i'm overlooking?

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