I've experimented with "Perlscript" on a web page under Microsoft's ASP system (Photo Server) with some success and some issues.

Ideally, this requires a central database. I've tinkered with using ADO via Perl's OLE mechanism, as well as using the DBI:: module under both ADO and ODBC backends.

I like the DBI interface a lot better, probably because it's native Perl in nature. However, I don't see a way to find and update something. It's great for looking up, and for adding whole rows, but how do I modify something? It seems like it would be possible if the database engine had an SQL extension command for that, but Access doesn't.

A big deal in this application is translating between 6-character codes and file names. In a regular perl script, this is trivial—just use a hash. But for the photos and thumbnails, each GET runs the script from scratch and does one such lookup. Populating a hash and holding it between calls would be great, but it looks like ASP and CGI just don't do this normally. So maybe the ASP page can ask a background program to do this? But communicating with such a program also seems like more overhead, and just using the general database would be simpler.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

—John

In reply to approaching a database solution by John M. Dlugosz

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