Manipulation of the DB is not really the end goal. What is more needed is the ability of the administrators (primarily non-programmers) to define blocks of code that fit into an existing framework and that will control the way in which the system interprets data from the DB, so that the system can controls the sequencing (and later, the appearance) of web pages based on data submitted by form POSTs (both current and previous POSTs) by a particular user.

The current system has some capability to do this, but it is limited to parameterized subroutine calls, in which the administrators can specify the name and execution order of perl subroutines to call and can provide static parameters to those subroutines. The subroutines then have full access to the database. This, however, is very limiting because administrators have no way to stitch these together to do more complex operations, so new subroutines must continually be written by the programmer.

By adding scripting support through a web interface, I am trying to move some of the coding from the programmer domain into the administrator domain, in a controlled manner.