At 3:11 PM -0500 9/9/06, Mark Stosberg wrote:
I do share your sentiment that CGI.pm shouldn't be a clone of how P5 works. I'd like the HTML building methods to stay out, which wasn't even one of the differences you cared about yourself. On the other hand, there is a real benefit to in being similar enough so that porting from Perl 5 is easy. Radical differences can forked into Web.pm or something.
If you want to see something more radical, have a look at my first major CPAN modules from 2001ish.
Mainly HTML::FormTemplate and CGI::Portable. Between those and their dependencies (HTML::EasyTags, Class::ParamParser, Data::MultiValuedHash, CGI::MultiValuedHash), was an entire and cleaner and more modular re-implementation of CGI.pm plus a few extras (and minus a few bits; I never implemented file upload handling). It is also more or less backwards compatible with CGI.pm where it makes sense.
The combination is a bit large to be a CGI.pm replacement, but I think that a lot can be learned from this if one wants to make more significant CGI.pm improvements.
Note that I am still using those modules of mine for my own personal web sites, but I'm not aware that they ever took off with other people in a big way.
I also don't plan to straight-port them to Perl 6 since in large I don't know if they really offer anything people want that other web frameworks don't. I also don't have a big stake in them like I do with my current database-centric modules (where I'm more certain they can have a big impact). However, I'm sure the web modules can influence improvements to CGI.pm in Perl 6, and I will do so at an appropriate time.
-- Darren Duncan
