I've done quite a bit of work with PHP. Still do a fair amount. It is great for the majority of web work out there, because it does a lot of the work for you. It is a language specifically tailored for web work, with all sorts of functions in the standard library that simplify stuff like connecting to a database, reading form input, and so on. Still, one can get into the guts of things a little bit, so you don't feel like you're being hedged into doing things a certain way.

But that's not good enough for me.

Like, I suspect, a lot of other Perl Hackers, I like to have an insane amount of control over my apps. I like to be able to have my web applications interact seamlessly with any other utility I've written, and to use the same libraries. PHP sucks for pretty much anything but web-application stuff, so part of the reason all my own web stuff is written in Perl is that I can have it do what I want without trying to fit the square peg of PHP into the round hole of sysadminning or whatever.

As far as a strict comparison of CGI.pm (and other perl CGI tools) to PHP, I would have to say they are comparable. If you are comfortable with Perl, you'll prefer it to PHP. If you know a bit of Perl, but aren't fluent, you might prefer PHP. PHP was designed for the web, and it does its job pretty well.

LAI