NAME

CGI-Prototype - Create a CGI application by prototyped subclasssing

SYNOPSIS

      package My::HelloWorld;
      use base CGI::Prototype;

      sub template { \ <<'END_OF_TEMPLATE' }
      [% self.CGI.header; %]
      Hello world at [% USE Date; Date.format(date.now) | html %]!
      END_OF_TEMPLATE

      My::HelloWorld->activate;

DESCRIPTION

The core of every CGI application seems to be roughly the same:

• Analyze the incoming parameters, cookies, and URLs to determine the state of the application (let's call this "dispatch").
• Based on the current state, analyze the incoming parameters to respond to any form submitted ("respond").
• From there, decide what response page should be generated, and produce it ("render").

CGI::Prototype creates a "Class::Prototyped" engine for doing all this, with the right amount of callback hooks to customize the process. Because I'm biased toward Template Toolkit for rendering HTML, I've also integrated that as my rendering engine of choice. And, being a fan of clean MVC designs, the classes become the controllers, and the templates become the views, with clean separation of responsibilities, and "CGI::Prototype" a sort of "archetypal" controller.

INSTALLATION

To install this module type the following:

perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install

DEPENDENCIES

This module requires these other modules and libraries:

Class::Prototyped
Template (aka Template Toolkit)

AUTHOR

Randal L. Schwartz, <merlyn@stonehenge.com>

Special thanks to Geekcruises.com and an unnamed large university for providing funding for the development of this module.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2003, 2004 by Randal L. Schwartz

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.8.5 or, at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.