well, webmin is written in perl and is free software btw:
Copyright (c) Jamie Cameron
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or
without modification, are permitted provided that the following
conditions are met:
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyrig
+ht
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in
+ the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribu
+tion.
3. Neither the name of the developer nor the names of contributors
may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this so
+ftware
without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE DEVELOPER ``AS IS'' AND ANY
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE DEVELOPER OR
CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL,
SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT
NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES;
LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER
CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT,
STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE)
ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF
ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
---------------------------------------------------------
http://www.webmin.com/webmin/intro.html says
What licence is Webmin distributed under?
Following the acquisition of Webmin by Caldera, all past
and future versions of Webmin are available under the BSD
licence. This means that on Linux and other platforms, Webmin
may be freely distributed and modified for commercial and
non-commercial use.
Because Webmin supports the concept of modules (like PhotoShop
plugins), anyone can develop and distribute their own Webmin
modules for any purpose, and distribute them under any licence
(such as GPL, commercial or shareware). More information about
the Webmin API and writing your own modules is available.
A copy of the BSD license can be found on Debian GNU/Linux systems in
/usr/share/common-licenses/ .
so yes, perl will be efficient in that.
The perl cookbook helped me a lot a few years ago. Perl Books Perl Reference Materials: Books
MySQL is great ;) But so are PostgreSQL and SQLite. How it will help you? You can store and access data efficently.