have you folks seen kylix? http://www.borland.com/kylix/
check out this white paper that describes how to create cgis and modules for apache: http://www.borland.com/kylix/papers/apache_development.pdf kylix looks pretty much like ye olde application framework, just like what many of us have built in the past, plus a gui that allows boneheads to drag and drop application components and right click to configure the application's properties, resulting in an immediately deployable cgi or dso ("rad", or "rapid application development"). competition with this product (which has some really freaking license clauses which you can read about on freshmeat) seems pretty easy: 1) create a suite of standard web components (such as emailform); 2) build a gui to let you easily assemble and configure those components (and your custom components) into an application; and 3) provide a compiler tool that creates the cgi executable or module dso given the inputs from #2. the kylix netclx layer, defining actions (which are dispatched according to the value of the path info) and page producers (which generate html forms), is your standard mvc design. no real innovation there, we have several to choose from on cpan and in our own cvs repositories. one question is: what frameworks and components to use (task #1). you could limit the tool to one framework, say mason, or you could support an abstraction layer (libservlet comes to mind :) which would allow you to select mason or tt or axkit as you prefer. anybody interested?
