The company I work for has done several sites using mod_perl and HTML::Template. I'm not sure how to advise you without giving away how we did them, but I'll take a stab.

• Take a leap and go the PerlHandler route. It's not as simple as CGI, but this will alow you to easily separate the site into different functional layers.
• Separate the html completely from the logic. The benefits of this are far to great to list here.
• Don't be afraid to have lots of utility libraries. It will save you lots of code replication (and debugging, etc..).
• objects and inheritance are your friends.

I realize that you're running IIS (you have my sympathy), but you can still make use of the techniques. You may also want to consider a minor porting task on your own if you want to get away from IIS. In one case we were locked in to using MSQL, I took it upon myself to port the database to MySQL on Linux. The benchmarks were convincing enough to move to MySQL (a factor of 10 speed increase). Often just saying there's a better way is just ignored, have benchmarked or demonstratable proof is harder to ignore.

Good luck,

/\/\averick

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.