It seems you embed Perl, not VB or C# or whatever ASP developers normally use, into the HTML, so it's not like someone can port code directly from an ASP environment into apache+perl, is it?

Correct - it's a Perl module. Although Inline::WSC could potentially be used (on Windows) to allow for VBScript <% %> scriptlets, it would only work on Windows. Which already has VBScript for ASP. And who (among us) wants to write web applications in VBScript?

Why would someone want to use Apache(2)::ASP instead of HTML::Mason?

If someone wants to use HTML::Mason they probably have their reasons. HTML::Mason is mature (about 8 years old) and IIRC several large sites run on it (can't remember any off the top of my head though). Bricolage runs on it.

However, as I have discovered for myself, there are a lot more Microsoft ASP programmers than Mason/Catalyst/CGI::Application/EmbPerl/etc programmers. ASP is an acceptable paradigm and is easily replicated. To get more programmers using Perl it is wise to offer something familiar.

One thing I enjoy about Apache2::ASP is the use of "Handlers" to process non-navigational requests (i.e. forms, AJAX requests, etc). Without stepping entirely outside of the ASP paradigm I can still have access to the ASP objects ($Request, $Response, $Session, $Server, $Application). Since Handlers can subclass other handlers (i.e. MediaManager subclasses UploadHandler) you can get a lot of functionality just by composing your Handlers from simpler classes. If I'm not mistaken, Mason has some kind of "stacking" functionality for Components. I never really understood it.

Another difference between Apache2::ASP and HTML::Mason is that Mason uses Apache::Session while Apache2::ASP uses its own session-state manager. I've used Apache::Session before and ran into problems (framesets caused issues, plus I wanted my sessions table structured differently). So that's why Apache2::ASP doesn't use Apache::Session. A previous incarnation did, but no longer.

Regards

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