As they say, Perl is the duct tape of the Internet. It's string handling, flexibility, and the ton of previous work (CPAN) to draw on, make it as good as anything for Web programming as far as I'm concerned. Regarding performance, CGI has inherently poor performance. Calling a CGI script starts a new process and the overhead is often greater than work completed by the script. mod_perl (perl.apache.org) however solves that problem by allowing you to turn CGI scripts into part of the server process itself. mod_perl is as fast as anything I'm aware of. Therefore, if you start with Perl/CGI, your options are always open. -Will