Progamming HTML

[Jim Hickstein]

> I want a file that describes how to layout the page ...

YMMV, verily, and this may not even be close, but I've lately been fooling 
with a thing from www.gossamer-threads.com.  I'm using their DBMan SQL 
product, which cost me $350 (IIRC), but it's all written in Perl, against 
their GT::Template module, which is the good part.  (And you can get it for 
free if you're not a commercial user, and they have a good support forum 
web site, etc.)

I had thrown something together for the BayLISA member database a while 
back.  It used LDAP (I had recently been learning that), and I wrote a 
bunch of Perl to to the "CGI" CPAN module.  I've since extended that same 
thing to do a similar thing for my employer, and ultimately the 
provisioning/billing system for my business (www.imap-partners.net).

It was a prototype then, and it's still a prototype.  And: Ick.  It needs 
to be MySQL underneath, and it needs to be turned inside-out, i.e. 
interpreter code embedded in HTML templates, not HTML code embedded in 
Perl.  I started again to write something from scratch, and then said, 
"Wait a minute.  Someone has _got_ to have solved this problem already. 
Let's see what I can find."

And I found GT::Template.  (Yes, I know about PHP, but I was looking for 
several more layers on top of that, and Perl is fine as long as you don't 
have to use Net::LDAP, which is very slow.  PHP and Perl are to assemblers 
as the thing I wanted is to SAP.  Well, sort of.)

DBMan SQL is a bit simplistic, and I'm having to bend it in unusual ways, 
so I may abandon it and write directly to GT::Template after a while.  But 
it got me a long, long way along the road for not much dough  and very 
little original Perl code of my own.  Links SQL may be a better fit for 
you; hard to tell.  They have several other products.

Most of all, though, the Perl code that this outfit produces in their GT::* 
modules is amazing.  It was like taking a $350 Perl class just to look at 
what they do.  And I just about write Perl for a living, these days (in 
between reading and deleting email for a living) and consider myself a 
satifsactory Perl programmer, but this stuff is from a Perl virtuoso.  That 
was worth the price of admission, for me.

YMMV, verily.