Hello,

I've been writing perl scripts and perl CGIs for quite a while now. But all of my scripts/pages/cgi follow the design of:

1) get something from user
2) do something with that data
3) generate and display html

Nothing fancy, and I don't use CGI.pm. I've just always generated and printed my own html, what can I say? I'm a control freak.

Some newer projects I'm working on could benefit from not doing constant GETs or constantly refreshing a page. For example, I'd like to have a page that could be broken up using frames or tables or whatever and stream text to each one of those frames/cells without doing constant GETs/refreshes. Something like multitail for a web page. That's just an example, not necessarily what I'm doing though. I'm just trying to get around the constant requests for data from the client, same thing with refreshes.

Ajax seems to be the tool to use for this sort of thing but I've never really dug into javascript, so I'd have to jump in to that if it's the way to go. I've checked out CGI::Ajax, but it seems to hide me from the 'code' the same way CGI.pm does....I'd rather stay away from that.

So my question is, what's the best way to approach this?

Thanks!

you could take a look at script.aculo.us for and include these javascript libraries in your site. It's a professional framework for handling AJAX and fancy effects that are working on most browsers...


And as you call yourself a control freak: mod_perl will provide you with much more detailed control over the http request and its handling so this may be an interesting option. I'm working in web development for some years now and mod_perl is my favourite technology, unfortunately not very common.

control freak?

no CGI.pm
not very perl.

sounds like you like typing
A lot!

:-)

If you want that much control, I think you will have to learn Javascript and write those parts that way. If you want a little help, jQuery is a great library. But if you won't even use CGI.pm (much less any of the hundreds of more modern, excellent Perl modules for web applications, then you probably want to do it by hand.

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

I've been working with CGI and CGI::Ajax and have the beginnings of what I want. I think it will definitly be beneficial to me to use one of the templating modules as well.

CGI::Ajax seems like it will hide me from the gory stuff, but I should still role up my sleeves and just learn javascript and/or jquery...along with how to work ajax in to that.

Well I've got some learning to do ....