Thanks for your answers. I'm not sure how depending on mod_perl will work when trying to support IIS. The Javascript answer is disconcerting. Not because I'm anti-JS. Nor am I pro-JS. Just that my experience is that saying a feature will only be used for some things ends up getting it used for all things. Your JavaScript expert will want a feature that should be implemented in perl. But the perl guys don't have time, so the JS guy will just go ahead and implement it. I've seen that type of thing happen before - either it's too big of an itch to wait, or whatever. It can take a lot of project management skills to keep in line. In many ways, it's cheaper/easier to just discard JS use, or accept that it will be used for anything and everything.

To be honest, I've never managed to get MySQL set up on my RHEL3 box. DB2, however, was easy. But maybe that's just me. Regardless, database abstraction is unlikely to be successfully accomplished on a single database platform. Just like developing a cross-platform Java tool ... and everyone develops it on Windows. (Seen that before, too.) Or even a cross-platform perl utility - and only running it on Linux.