Anyone who's looked at the internals of CGI will agree that it's not the most efficient perl module. It's pretty big, and wears alot of hats. But it works, and works well. CGI3 has alot to live up to if it's looking at replacing CGI.pm as the de facto CGI module on CPAN - something I am not sure it's trying to do. In fact I'm not sure what it's intended purpose is.

It's interface is similar to CGI.pm, almost identical AFAIK. I've noticed a few bugs/missing methods here and there, and emailed the Author, who is NOT Lincoln Stein, but rather a fellow named David James (see CGI3's README). He is rather proud of his module, which he should be, but bug fixes are slow to appear, it hasn't been updated on CPAN since August 24th 1999. BTW, he told me that Lincoln does the uploads in his CPAN directory, but does not develop the module.

My experience testing it has been fairly positive. Most missing methods are non-critical. Alot of the :cgi-lib stuff is gone or missing, which may be a good or bad thing depending on how much legacy code you need to maintain.

Just a few problems I have with it:

• Lincoln didn't write it. Granted others could, but I trust his work, and think he has the knowledge to ensure that the quality/security is maintained.
• Updates are rather slow. Something like CGI needs to be updated somewhat often, not once every 6 months.
• It means a new round of security fixes and updates while reviews happen on the all-new revised code.
• It was based on CGI.pm 2.60. CGI.pm is now at 2.74. Unless it's kept up to date, it won't become the successor.
• Forking CGI.pm would generally be a bad idea. CGI.pm must maintain a constant movement forward, with unified code based. If a switch is going to happen, it has to be done fully, and in one direction, forward.
• No apparent plans to move to CGI3, it "feels" like it was an experiment.

All in all, it's neat to play with, but I would not recommend using it in production code:

#Always
use CGI;
[download]

Yay!

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

I just hope the guys guilt/innocence doesn't lie in your hand..

extremely: What, they used an array where they should've used a hash?! Argh, guilty I say, guilty!

:-)

-marius