Well, this isn't so much of a PHP v Perl issue as a general web issue, but this is the first forum that it's relevant to at all since I thought of it, so I'll post it here.

I've recently been learning mod_perl, and working at moving my mindset over to it. It's not difficult, so much as a drastic mental switch. I've always avoided PHP, ASP, Coldfusion, Embperl, and other solutions of those types. I recently discovered Text::Template, and I love it. What's the difference? Dependence on the webserver.

With CGI Perl and Text::Template, I have command line scripts that are optimized to work with HTML browsers, but that function and are accessable without them.

When you convert to mod_perl, your documents cease to be apps, and the webserver stops being a document server, and instead becomes (in the words of merlyn), a programmable app.

Since I tend to prefer to keep things low level and accessable (ASCII forever!), this is a bit of a drastic switch. So when looking at PHP and Perl, think about how you want to view your documents.

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