Mason is complete and non-buggy; no particular reason for updates other than the Perl under it. PHP’s entire approach is a mess and that includes embedded code. This is why not very many of us use Mason and haven’t for a decade: it encourages a PHP-like approach. If you really like that style of code, use PHP. It drives a ton of important sites and with some discipline can be clean.

If you want to see how powerful and easy web programming can be… Catalyst, Mojolicious, Dancer2, DBIx::Class, PSGI, uwsgi+perl, etc. Learning curve but great communities, great testing tools, good awareness of best practices and security. Worth it for the long haul. Maybe not for a one-off.

I am going to investigate Mason and Mojolicious Lite. Do they have built-in first-class session support? In file1.php

 <?php session_start(); $_SESSION['hello']=23; ?>
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and in file2.php

  <?php session_start(); echo $_SESSION['hello']; ?>
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does exactly what one expects, as long as the browser remains the same. php nicely takes care of sending a random cookie at the right time of the http protocol, and stores the 'hello' variable in the thereby-named disk file on the server. I know I can write this myself, but this reinvents a painful wheel. transparent variable persistence across different webpages is quite nice.

there? not there?

I did say that they all (all major Perl web frameworks) have sessions; and not only that but they are more secure without trying in Mojo and entirely configurable in a case like Catalyst so you can do sessions without cookies if necessary and keep the data on the backend in several different ways without any need for a database, again if necessary or preferable. I feel like you are intentionally reading my comments lightly. :|

I also said if you want to use Mason because you like embedded code, you might as well stick with PHP. There will be no practical difference in what you do if that is the style you like and deployment will be harder with Perl than host default PHP. I should re-emphasize code embedded templates (meaning, controllers and models are all embedded in the view) is a mess for any serious project and it might come off snooty but it's not meant to be: I do not know any devs I consider serious or competent who write Perl this way. If you try to write it that way, you might end up blaming Perl for giving you the rope and moving on to Python or Ruby next because they force better practices in this domain.

I want to repeat learning curve. Catalyst in particular is quite hard to learn because it has so much it can do. Once a site is done though, adding features, changing things, testing (Mojo has really good testing too and Dancer is well-liked though I don't use it), all becomes extremely easy and make painting yourself into codebase corners less likely.

In Dancer, you can do

session hello => 42;
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and later

my $hello = session 'hello';
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In config.yml, you can specify what kind of session storage you want to use: simple, cookie, storable, or YAML. The later ones are persistent.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,
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so now I am wondering about whether there exists a non-mess alternative to quick-and-dirty php (not to the full-blown drupal-joomla-mvc-etc web framework alternative).

Indeed there are such alternatives. I would suggest that you take a look at one of the lightweight CGI wrappers (CGI::Lite, CGI::Minimal, CGI::Simple, etc.) add FCGI if you want persistence and then use something like Template to handle the display of the results in HTML. This can be straightforward, with nowhere near the learning curve of some of the heavy frameworks and yet provides better security than putting your code inside the documents. You can still do this with Embperl (which does appear to be alive and well) instead if you prefer.

There are so many ways to approach this sort of task in Perl, but really only one in PHP. That's part of the joy of Perl - welcome to our world.

For quick and dirty, I would recommend Mojolicious::Lite, (see the Mojolicious::Guides::Tutorial)which offers all the power of full Mojolicious with some syntactic sugar to make it quick and easy to build a simple site. You also have an easy migration path to full Mojolicious as desired.

There is a ton of great documentation on line and some great videos: http://mojocasts.com as well as youtube.

Link to Mojolicious embedded perl templates/content generation: http://mojolicio.us/perldoc/Mojolicious/Guides/Rendering#Embedded-Perl

thanks, everyone. wikipedia is indeed a first goto source for me before I investigate anything further.

I played with mojo 3 years ago and thought it was very clever. too clever for my needs. sometimes simple is good.

the "many choices" is not always the best. I think this is why php survived. there was no one single perly choice with good prospects. (there are many abandoned projects; building a website requires betting on the underlying framework.) of course, at some point below, variety must stop. perl would not have succeeded with 20 projects. there is one perl5 project and one perl6 project.

so, if I start now, let's say I want a php-like embeddable scripting language that has:

1. a project with more than 5 core developers and likely survival for a decade.
2. perl6 syntax and perl6 cpan
3. $_SESSIONS[]
4. easy ubuntu install
is there a project that checks these four boxes? mojo? /iaw

I can only speak for Catalyst since I used it, I still have a wee bit of a hard time to grok the MVC model but its use is quite simple, there are a lot of tutorials out there and deployment is a breeze. I recommend it full-heartedly

BTW & FYI: Re: Does Perl have if(isset?

Regards, Karl

Mason's last update, accdg to wikipedia, was 4 years ago.

hahah, wikipedia as a goto source of information on active projects, brilliant :p

wikipedia is better now...because I updated the date.