I've been hacking on perl code for about seven years now and only a week or two ago finally broke down and studied the perldoc for HTML::Template. Played with it for a few hours one day and now feel comfortable with it as a part of my toolkit.

I tend to handle nearly everything else I do with the workhorses: CGI and DBI. I snatched two subroutines from Rose::DB::Object for a project two years ago (so I could handle postgresql's store an array in a single field feature), but have otherwise been happy with the old standbys. I'm fascinated by what is said above about Template::Toolkit and keep putting off reading its tutorial (which lost a recent competitive bid to the much shorter one for HTML::Template). Five years ago I wrote a 1,000 line script, significant subroutines of which hand rolled LaTeX markup for producing press releases. I keep wanting to refactor that as a module and guess TT will need to be a part of that.

What I haven't heard mentioned here yet is anything about managing configurations. My first major application used a hand rolled mess (which I'm still occasionally pulled back into maintaining). When I moved from spending less time organizing and more time coding, I found and fell in love with Config::Simple and have used it for everything since, and only a few weeks ago extended it with Config::Simple::Inherit for my current project. My hand rolled mess handles heredocs for feeding configurable copy into a webpage. But I'd love a more elegant solution and will likely refactor the heredoc handling code from that (not that many lines, really) as another extension as Config::Simple::Heredoc one of these days, unless someone else beats me to it, first.

I had a frustrating experience with CGI::Application, related to discovering conflicts where it did not seem to play well with some other module I was using on that project, but otherwise was very much impressed with its design and organization. I still write my code to return, not print my html and to organize my dispatch as CGI::App taught me, figuring that one day a future refactor might actually try to integrate it into most any project I've written since. But I still have not done more than test it since then.

Not sure that my experience would qualify me as a Ninja, or a Monk, but over the last three or four years I've felt more comfortable reliably producing working applications with the tools I have beguin to master.

-- Hugh