As a refugee from the web programming wars I fell rather confused as I read through various comments here and info on the Web about contructing large Web based apps in Perl.

I have been doing this for a while, and have a couple of pretty large (20K+ lines of Perl in about 40 scripts) apps running quite happily. But they are maintenance nightmares. They feature

• relatively little use of CGI,pm - usually only for parsing form values = we started out using cgi-lib.pl when we stopped using out hand-rolled parser.
• All the HTML is in <<here statements, this stuff was started in 1994. We did use a template parser of our own for a while, but it was too clunky so we gave it away.
• Session management is done by using a variable passed in the URL.
• About five years ago we updated from flat-file dtabases to MySQL with DBI&DBD

My more current work uses:

• CGI.pm extensively
• Template::Html for all display.
• CGI::Session for sessions management.
• Abstract::SQL for building complex SQL on the fly
• and of course the inevitable DBI&DBD combinations.

My question is this. I am about to embark on a total re-write of one of the 20K+ nightmares and a totally new app that is strting to feel like it will be five to six times the size.

I would like to make some intelligent choices about new ways to do all of this! I see lots of Application Frameworks getting around, but I would like some informed opinion about these.

• What are monks using as frameworks for large web-apps?
• What are your favourite CPAN modules other than the usual suspects such as those I have mentioned? Why?
• Do you have any pointers to suitable books (other than O'Reilly I have everything they have published related to Perl and the Web.

Please be as eloquent and verbose as you desire! I love reading long and etailed posts as much as I love the short pithy ones.

jdtoronto