Web Development in Perl

WEB DEVELOPMENT IN Perl Naveen Gupta nkrgupta@gmail.com

AGENDA
Introduction to Web Development & Perl
Perl Powered Sites/Application
Basic Web Programming in Perl
CGI Programming in Perl
Creating HTML Forms
mod_perl
Templating Systems in Perl
Web 2.0 Applications in Perl
Perl vs PHP - A Tale of 2 Languages

Introduction to Web Development
What is Web Dev?
– Development of websites, internet applications, e-commerce sites, social networks etc.
– Includes Web Designing, Content Development, client/server side coding, Web Server configuration
– Flexible Model, easy to adopt to, Barriers to entry very low
– Contributing Factors - Propagation of Open Source Technologies, WYSIWYG Tools, Internet Awareness
– Killer Apps – Google Docs, Flickr, WordPress, PhpBB, WikiMedia, YouTube and millions others

Dominant Technologies
C, C++, Pascal, Shell Script
ASP
JAVA, J2EE and related Frameworks
Perl with or without CGI
PHP
.NET – C#, VB.NET
Python
Ruby on Rails
ColdFusion

Introduction to Perl
Created by Larry Wall in 1987
Interpreted, Scripting Language
C - like syntax
Best of C, awk and sed
Best language for Text Manipulation/ Data Processing
Swiss Army knife for SysAdmins, Programmers
Supports modules, OO, DB interaction, pointers, regular expressions, multithreading, sockets, MVC frameworks
Highly Portable, well documented

Perl and the WEB
De facto language for CGI Programs
Made popular by Matt’s Script Archive
Easy to build and maintain
Wide acceptance of LAMP framework – Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python/Ruby
Great DB support via DBI set of Modules
Strength of Perl – CPAN, Comprehensive Perl Archive Network
Hands down winner with the advent of mod_perl, FastCGI, Catalyst, Moose etc.

How to get Perl?
- For *NIX Platforms – Included with almost every Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS X installation. Source can be can be downloaded from http://www.perl.org and compiled using “ gcc”. RPMs are also available.
- For Windows Platforms – Installation Binary distributed by http://www.activestate.com as ActivePerl. Yet, complete LAMP installations distributed by http:// www.apachefriends.org , http://www.apache.org , http://www.indigostar.com etc. are most popular. Complete listing can be found at http://www.perl.org/ports

Perl Powered Sites/Applications

My First Web Program in Perl
#!/usr/bin/perl print “Content-type:/text/html ”; print “Hello World!<br>”;

Adding a Bit of `Perl`
#!/usr/bin/perl print “Content-type:/text/html ”; my $time= localtime ( time ); print “Today is $time <br>”; foreach my $key ( sort keys %ENV){ print qq{$key = $ENV{$key} <br>}; }

Jazz it up with a little HTML
#!/usr/bin/perl print “Content-type:/text/html ”; print “<h1>Welcome to my First Perl Web page</h1>”; print “Perl is a great language!<br>”; print “It can create killer websites too!<br>”; print “Wanna see how?”;

Here Document
#!/usr/bin/perl print “Content-type:/text/html ”; print <<HTML; <h1>Welcome to my First Perl Web page</h1> Perl is a great language!<br> It can create killer websites too!<br> Wanna see how? HTML

Going Dynamic with CGI
#!/usr/bin/perl use CGI; use strict; my $cgi=new CGI; print $cgi->header(); print $cgi->start_html(-title=>’First CGI.pm program’, -meta=>{‘keywords’=>’perl cgi’, ‘ copyright’=>’WebOSS ‘07’}, -style=>{‘src’=>’style.css’}, -BGCOLOR=>’blue’); contd….

… contd Going Dynamic with CGI print $cgi->h1(“Welcome to a CGI APP!”); print “Your IP Address is : ”.$ENV{‘REMOTE_ADDR’}.“<br>”; print “You have been directed here from: $ENV{‘HTTP_REFERER’}” ; print $cgi->a({-href=>’http://search.cpan.org’, -target=>’_blank’}, “Go to CPAN!”); print $cgi->end_html;

The Power of mod_perl
“… mod_perl is more than CGI scripting on steroids. It is a whole new way to create dynamic content by utilizing the full power of the Apache web server to create stateful sessions, customized user authentication systems, smart proxies and much more. Yet, magically, your old CGI scripts will continue to work and work very fast indeed. With mod_perl you give up nothing and gain so much! …” – Lincoln Stein, Author – CGI.pm
- Perl Interpreter embedded in Apache
- Overcomes one-process-per-request limitation of CGI, 100x faster!
- Write Apache modules in Perl instead of C
- Hundreds of Modules available in CPAN
- Numerous Application Frameworks, Templating Systems
- Configure Apache’s httpd.conf via Perl

Perl Templating Systems
HTML::Mason
Template Toolkit
HTML::Template
SSI using mod_include or Apache::SSI module
Why use Templating System?
Consistency of Appearance
Reusability
Abstraction between logic and design
Division of Labour

Web 2.0 Apps in Perl
CGI::Ajax
Object Oriented module by Brian C. Thomas
Eliminates the need to write JS for AJAX Calls
Generates JS Functions from output by Perl subroutines
Can be implemented in large projects
HTML::TagCloud
Generates Tag Clouds, with different font sizes
CSS Based
Add method takes 3 arguments – a) Tag Name
b) URL to link to
c) Weight

WEB DEVELOPMENT IN Perl Perl vs PHP

APACHE INTEGRATION DOCUMENTATION API/ LIBRARY SUPPORT LEARNING CURVE PURPOSE/ UTILITY mod_php mod_perl, Fast CGI http:// www.php.net Perldoc, http:// perldoc. perl.org , CPAN PEAR and PECL, both from http://www.php.net 48606 active modules on CPAN and many others elsewhere Easier than Perl Easier than C, JAVA, .NET Made primarily for WEB. Can do CLI and other tasks. Multi-purpose, primarily for text pocessing, equally suited for sysadmin and web apps PHP Perl

WordPress, phpBB, Drupal, Coppermine, phpMyAdmin AWStats, Slash Code, BugZilla CMS / APPLICATIONS Yes, the main reason for its popularity Only with Modules like Mason, HTML::Template, Template::Toolkit etc. HTML EMBED PHP Perl

THANK YOU!
use Perl;

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Web Development in Perl

by Naveen Gupta on Oct 14, 2007

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