Reversing the rendering process is always messy and almost as often lossy. Don’t. Keep around the data in structured storage even after you’ve used your templates to output it in rendered form.

If you set things up right on the webserver’s end, you can then switch horses at any time, even generate half the site dynamically, the other half statically. The templates can be identical – eg. the Template Toolkit tutorial shows the same template being used with tpage, then ttree, then from within a CGI script.

Just don’t throw away your structured data.

Makeshifts last the longest.

If you want to remove what amounts to "static load" from your DB server, then consider inserting a caching proxy in the loop.

If the pages are really static, then the load on your DB will drop to near zero very quickly, but you will retain everything to allow for the occasional rare hit, or future changes.

It's probably an easier transition too.

update: s/index/cache/

i have never used squid, but it might be worth a try.

I get the feeling that would be like swatting flies with a sledgehammer in this case. There's a very nice trick you can do with mod_rewrite which would probably be all the OP needs. It goes something like this (untested):

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} \.html$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule /?(.*)$ /cgi-bin/generate.pl/$1
[download]

It needs more rules to make it really robust, but that's the general idea. Of course, generate.pl creates the static file and to "invalidate the cache", you just delete the static file and request the page.

Of course, this assumes Apache... but everybody runs Apache, right? :-)

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

Even without the mod_rewrite logic, you can do this with a simple 404 handler using a technique I demonstrated five years ago.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.

In other words, this smells like premature optimization.

You might also want to check out the Apache cache filter or mod_cache. One thing you could do for instance, is set the expiry for mod_cache to 1day, then every day mod_cache will allow Apache to generate one copy of the page, and it will cache it for the duration of the day. This is extremly easy to impliment, and will allow you to keep the parts of your site that require database access dynamic, such as a search feature.

Mason has faculties to deal with this kind of thing too btw, You might want to read about Mason's cache feature.

squid rocks, it's easy to setup and it can scale as much as you may need it to -- but if you don't want to run a seperate daemon (or if your hosting provider won't let you) mod_cache may meet your needs (it's still somewhat experimental however).