chorg has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings, from Insommniaville,

I am wondering (again). Right now, I can use either Flash of Java to have a downloadable client on a web page, which I can then use to get real time connection to a server. I'd love to do it in Perl instead. Is it possible?


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"Intelligence is a tool used achieve goals, however goals are not always chosen wisely..."

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Client Side Perl?
by OeufMayo (Curate) on Dec 13, 2000 at 13:34 UTC

    In fact, you can do client-side Perl scripting with the Activestate release, it's called PerlScript. It allows to embed some perl in a HTML page.

    quoted from ActiveState docs:

    Client-side PerlScript has the added requirement that both Perl for Win32 and PerlScript be installed on each computer will will be loading PerlScript pages.

    Client-side Perlscript should only be used if you can control the configuration of the computers on which it will be run. If your goal is build an application which will be used by a large number users, Server-side PerlScript is considerably more practical.

    -- 
PerlMonger::Paris(http => 'paris.pm.org');
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Re: Client Side Perl?
by davorg (Chancellor) on Dec 13, 2000 at 14:05 UTC
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Re: Client Side Perl?
by merlyn (Sage) on Dec 13, 2000 at 08:43 UTC
    Well, with flash, you have to have flash installed. With Java, you have to have Java installed. With Perl, you have to have Perl installed. But no sane person would run a random Perl script thrown at him from a server. Do you really want to do that? I think not.{grin}

    -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Re: Client Side Perl?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Dec 13, 2000 at 08:58 UTC
    You can do it with Internet Explorer and ActiveX. If your client has the plug-in. If they trust you. If they happen to be using that browser.

    Which means that the default answer is "No", and if they are competent and care about security, the answer is always going to be "No".

    Sorry.

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Re: Client Side Perl?
by repson (Chaplain) on Dec 13, 2000 at 08:59 UTC
    You can give them a perl script which uses Tk or Win32::GUI to make a client. However the client will have to (?) run independently from the web browser, the client computer will need at have perl installed (unless you use perl2exe) and they will have to trust you, since you would have total power over there computer.
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