I have invested a lot of time learning and buying books on Perl and I think it is a very mature, multipurpose language. Best of all, the support you get from people that do work in Perl (like the monks here) is outstanding.

However, in realizing how "expensive" CGI is on a server (specially if you make DB connections, according to Merlyn), tecnologies like PHP become more and more attractive to web developers.

Some of you may point to mod_perl, which I am now aware of. However, in my particular case, where I rely upon third party hosting services, mod_perl is not an option as most (if not all) hosting services won't allow you to write modules to the web server.

I plan to continue using Perl since I have grown fond of it and have invested lots of time learning it. But I will also begin learning PHP and consider it seriuosly when developing a web based application in the future.

Rodry