Hello fellow monks,

Thanks to a fundamental requirement change, I want to make an existing CGI Perl application do something it was never designed for. (Or throw it away and start over, but I'm hoping that won't be the best course of action!)

This application is a single CGI script, plus about a dozen internal modules (and a few more from CPAN). From a black box perspective, it's basically a web form which is used to generate a data file. Nothing special, by any means.

The original requirement was that this would be used internally only, so it's currently on an internal web server. Now, (you guessed it), management wants to give it to a customer as an easily installable closed-source desktop application (Windows primarily, but cross-platform support would be even better.)

I see my options basically as follows:

  1. Rewrite the whole thing in Java. (Lot of work, but will meet the new requirement.)
  2. Rewrite the interface component in Perl/Tk (Much less work, but not sure how successful I'll be at compiling it and putting it into an easily installable package. Having customers install ActiveState Perl would be a very, very tough sell. It needs to be one installer (or, better yet, a single executable).)
  3. Keep the application as-is, but somehow package that into a single executable. (Compiled separately for Win/Mac/Linux of course). This is potentially the least amount of work, but I'm not aware of any reasonable way to do this, without requiring customers run a web server(!) on their desktops.

Am I missing something? How would you go about this?

In reply to Perl CGI app to executable? by wanna_code_perl

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