From: "Fran Fabrizio" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> You oversimplify. Cookies do work fine. What creates, reads, modifies,
> validates the cookies? What ties the cookies to useful state
> information that is stored server-side? There's a lot of coding
> potentially involved. Yes, perl modules exist. Yes, they'll most
> likely need customization (in my case, I've customized AuthCookie, and
> tied it to Apache::Session. It wasn't the end of the world, but it
> wasn't trivia. A cookie by itself is of rather limited usefulness.
You can avoid most of the grunge work here by using one or more
of the high-level modules like Embperl, Apache::ASP, Mason, etc.
that handle sessions and a lot more for you.
One thing that I don't think anyone has mentioned so far that is
an inherent advantage to a web interface is that unless you really
go out of your way to break it, you automatically end up with
a well-defined client-server network interface. Thus as you
or your users discover parts of the application that can be
completely automated later, someone can easily whip out some
scripts with LWP to get/post anything without human intervention
where with a traditional GUI it takes a massive effort to ever go
beyond pointing and clicking. Making an interface easy to
use is often at odds with making it easy to automate, and in
the long run anything you can make 'full-auto' is going to save
time and money (unless the object of the site is to make the
user view a lot of banner ads...).
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
