Good Day,

I was reading Z-Rated Code and Reinventing the Wheel which made reference to a few alternatives to the CGI module. One in particular was CGI::Simple. The CGI::Simple perldocs say the following with regards to the import_names method:

This method was silly, non OO and has been deleted.

Now, CGI::Simple's goal is to provide an OO interface, so naturally this method doesn't make much sense here.

But the statement that it was silly made me think a bit. What do other's think about using import_names?

I write web apps for a living. For most of my apps, I break out the controller into packages of event handlers (each package representing related functionality). import_names allows me to import all of my params into a namespace (I normally use in::) so I don't have to pass an object or hash between packages. It even supports multi-values as arrays (i.e. @in::foo).

I remember that PHP had a similar feature that was ultimately frowned upon because of security concerns, but I thought those were moot here because we specify a namespace, into which to dump the data.

Now, I am not debating the advantages of an OO framework by any means. I am just curious if there are any major pitfals with import_names that I am not seeing.

Thanks,