CGI still exists, and hasn't died yet. That's about all that it has going for it though. Nowadays MVC frameworks are all the rage. Mojolicious is great. But everyone has their favorites, including Dancer, Catalyst, and even grand-daddy, CGI::Application.

With a framework like Mojolicious the process is pretty simple. Take a look at the documentation on the link I provided and see if that seems easier.

Two disadvantages that plain old CGI have are that every time a new hit comes in the Perl interpreter has to fire up all over again, which takes time. And second, non-trivial applications have a habit of becoming too complicated from a coding standpoint since plain old CGI.pm doesn't do anything to help promote separation of concerns (Model, View, Controller).

As others said, if most of your pages will have dynamic content, look into frameworks. To answer your first questions, it varies. Some people have a single CGI that runs everything, calling functions in other files depending on the pathinfo (the way PHP apps like Wordpress or Drupal run everything through index.php). Others use multiple CGIs, each for a different function. Others use SSI, which allows you to embed Perl scripts (or other executables) in HTML, but in a pretty inflexible way, so that's not common. But look at frameworks.

As for your last requirement: if you want a portion of a page updated regularly without refreshing the whole page, you'll want to look at client-side solutions like Ajax. You can push updates from the server side with Apache's nph-script method, but I've always thought that's pretty ugly. You can also send HTTP headers or meta tags that will cause automatic refreshes, but then you're refreshing the whole page, which you said you don't want. (Those might work within an iframe to do part of a page; I'm not sure about that.) But sites that do dynamic updates to individual divs on the fly use Ajax or something similar, to fetch new content and change just what elements need to be changed. I think all the common frameworks come with a fair amount of support for Ajax built in, too.

I am in a similar situation. From what I see, Mojolicious and Dancer could give my little project that lacks strength.

I suspect that if I can understand the general concept of these applications the learning curve is not too hard.

To organize a little all files that have been generated, had thought of studying CGI:: Application ... Would it be better to learn directly Mojolicious or Dancer?

Thank you!

You can't go wrong with either so Dip your toes in all three with quickstart, do a quick compare, then dip some more ;)

Similar question at mod_perl website structure with lots of good reading material (aim for the short 1-page links first)

http://iam.richardbucker.com/2011/09/21/mojolicious-first-app/

cpan Mojolicious Dancer Catalyst

mojo generate lite_app MyMojoApp

dancer -a MyDancerApp

catalyst MyCatalystApp

oops, these generators are broken (for me) at the moment , so try it or see http://cgi-app.org/index.cgi?BestPractices

cpan Module::Starter::Plugin::CGIApp Titanium

titanium-starter --module=MyTitaniumApp --author=author --email=email

cgiapp-starter --module=MyCGIAppApp --author=author --email=email

cpan CGI::Application::Generator CGI::Application::Structured

cgiapp-starter --module=MyCGIAppApp --author=author --email=email

titanium-starter --module=MyTitaniumApp --author=author --email=email

cas-starter --module=MyCASApp --author=author --email=email

will work if you install cpan PETDANCE/Module-Starter-1.54.tar.gz