We all know that most of what is out there for "plug-n-play" CGI scripts are poorly written and possibly dangerous. You don't have to look very far to find people who ignore CGI.pm altogether and would never think to taint-check their data before sending it to a system call.

On the other hand, having gained some knowledge of Perl, I realize that most of these commonly-used form mailers, guestbooks, poll scripts, search engines , etc. would be trivial to write well.

My question is this: has somebody already done this? If I want a web poll program, for instance, is there somewhere where I could find one for free that follows good programming style? I ask because I'm thinking about offering a course on (very) basic web design and wanted to offer the possibility for the students to do some CGI-ish content, but didn't want to expose them to "those" programs... Or do I need to re-invent the wheel (but round this time, and without those big nasty dents in the hubcaps, and the rusty axle just aching to break)?

In reply to "Canned" CGI scripts by mpolo

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.