Chapter 18. Serving Perl Pages to the Web
In this chapter, we’ll see how to write simple web
database clients using Perl. Web applications written using Perl can
take advantage of the Apache module mod_perl and the HTTP::Mason library for robust and
high-performance web sites. We don’t discuss these in detail in this
book. We should note that unlike Perl, PHP was designed from the start
to be used for scripting web pages and is probably a better choice for
any major new web application.
In Chapter 2, we saw how to install the Apache web server on a Linux system, and the XAMPP package on Windows and Mac OS X. We can make our Perl scripts accessible from a web server by placing them in a location that the web server can access.
On a Linux system, the scripts should be placed in the cgi-bin directory under the web server document root, typically /var/www/cgi-bin or /usr/local/apache/htdocs/cgi-bin. For a Windows system, the scripts should be placed in C:\Program Files\xampp\cgi-bin. For a Mac OS X system using XAMPP, use /Applications/xampp/htdocs.
Depending on the system configuration, you may need to have
system root or administrator privileges to write files to this location.
You can assume these privileges under Linux by typing su -, under Windows by logging in as a user
with Windows Administrator privileges, or under Mac OS X prefacing
commands with the sudo
keyword.
Let’s write a small script to generate the following HTML page:
<html> <head> <title>My first Perl CGI script</title> ...
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