HTML::Mason and IIS

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

My company is currently investigating different templating tools to allow us to develop more maintainable, scalable Web site. The three options that we are considering are as follows:

HTML::Template.
This is a nice, light-weight method of adding using templates. However, we're not likely to use this tool as it does not appear suitable for large-scale development.

http://www.template-toolkit.org
This looks very promising, but the IS director is researching this technology.

HTML::Mason
This is the piece that I have been assigned to research. Unfortunately, Mason is optimized for Apache and mod_perl. Since we use IIS and are not likely to switch, this may be an issue.

Apparently, we can use the Mason Component Interpreter directly, but this is likely to have performance issues. We need to address this issue, but we're looking for the most cost-effective solution that fits our current architecture. Therefore, I'm wondering about the following:

Do any monks have any experience using Mason with IIS?

What recommendations would you make regarding an HTML templating system with IIS and why do you make said recommendations?

Ideally, we'd like something that is easy for our graphic designers to work with. They are somewhat resistant to learning anything that they consider "programming." Embedding Perl directly within HTML documents scares the heck out of them. Just showing them HTML::Template tags made them nervous.

Thanks in advance for any feedback!

Cheers,
Ovid

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Comment on HTML::Mason and IIS

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: HTML::Mason and IIS by dchetlin (Friar) on Dec 19, 2000 at 01:22 UTC
I know nothing about IIS, so I am going to contribute basically nothing on-topic for this node. Sorry. However, I do use Mason extensively. Your third bullet above talks about finding a system that's easy for designers to work with. I'm working on a paper called "Working with Designers and other non-Technical People". I haven't decided whether to submit it for the ApacheCon or YAPC. In my experience, Mason is far and away the best solution for parameterizing large websites where multiple people will be doing work on it. Mason's lead programmers are very focused on making Mason non-mod_perl specific, and I do use Mason for email (one of these days I'll post my vi scripts that let me do all sorts of fancy Perl things in email and news) so it's certainly workable outside of Apache. TT is also a very viable solution -- it will probably be faster than Mason, but I would still claim that Mason beats it in terms of the working with non-geeks factor. About a year ago, Mason was in vogue in the Perl community; everyone talked about how much it rocked. These days, TT has mostly replaced it as the one to buzz about. I use both, and they both have their plusses and minuses. Finally, you might consider Zope and friends. While tied closely to Python, Zope is not only Python -- most of its features can be used without knowing any snake-speak at all. And it has some great collaboration features that no Perl product I know of has matched yet. I also know that Gisle has been working on making Perl work in Zope, which would make it an even more inviting choice. -dlc	[reply]
Re: HTML::Mason and IIS by MeowChow (Vicar) on Dec 19, 2000 at 04:20 UTC
If performance under IIS is an issue, have you considered making use of either Velocigen or ActivePerl's freebie "Perl for ISAPI"? You may also want to consider embPerl , as HTML::Mason is as much a template language as it is a framework for building component-based sites, and thus could cause much strife among your web-designers. Update: I completely forgot about PerlScript, which is another ovious choice for dynamic content under IIS.	[reply]
Re: Re: HTML::Mason and IIS by OeufMayo (Curate) on Dec 19, 2000 at 05:31 UTC
I completely forgot about PerlScript, which is another ovious choice for dynamic content under IIS. As I mentionned in a recent note, perl needs to be installed on every machine you plan to make PerlScript run, and if it's a large scale project I'm not sure everybody will love to get it installed on their machine just to run some scripts. (Even if I think that everybody should have a perl on hisd computer) <kbd>-- PerlMonger::Paris(http => 'paris.pm.org');</kbd>	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: HTML::Mason and IIS by dws (Chancellor) on Dec 19, 2000 at 05:50 UTC
It needs to be installed on every machine, if you're using client-side scripting. Mason is server-side, unless you decide to get really fancy and push Perl scripts to the client. Then you'd need to install PerlScript on all client machines. Otherwise, this is a non-issue, since PerlScript installs along with ActiveState Perl.	[reply]