I've never worked professionally with web development under perl, mind you, but I do have some experience with various Java application servers and Java ServerPages. One popular approach is to have a Servlet (which would be roughly equivalent to a .pl) which does authentication, bookkeeping, determines what function you're calling, grabs data from a DB, prepares output and then calls the appropriate ServerPage (which would be a HTML::Template or other template format) which produces the output. For small applications one Servlet is enough, but when they get larger you split them according to what functionality they serve.

This approach works quite well, is scalable and has the bonus that it separates logic from presentation (which many people belive to be a good thing).

Me? I never practice what I preach. I'm in love with CGI.pm and am in the middle of writing my own page layout framework for my own site. I will have roughly one cgi script per function and all HTML will be generated on the fly without relying on template engines.

I'm probably reinventing the wheel, but I don't mind as long as I'm learning from the experience.

Cheers,
-- moodster

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