> I'll try to show how Apache::ASP could help here. In Apache::ASP, > scripts can be executed as subroutines, even with return values, > and I think this goes to the heart of what you need here.
The original e-mail was confusing, but I think what he's after is not so much the ability to call pages as subs but rather the ability to abstract away the fact that a sub might actually involve multiple user interactions (present a form, get a response, present another form, etc.) with breaks in actual execution. In other words, he wants to think of program execution in terms of a linear user session (as you would with a GUI app) rather than a series of separate requests. In my opinion, trying to abstract that stuff away in a web application causes to more problems than it solves, especially where back buttons and bookmarks are concerned. I think it's easier to take a state machine approach, the way CGI::MxScreen or Apache::PageKit do. (CGI::Application sort of does, but it doesn't capture the relationships of states to each other.) With Apache::ASP, I think people would generally embed the state transition logic in the pages, although this could probably be separated out if you were careful about it. - Perrin
