[boulder.pm] CGI.pm basics

[Wayde Allen]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2000, Eric Shore Baur wrote:

> 	Something I've been wondering for awhile...  What are the benits
> of using cgi.pm?  Right now, my cgi scripts just parse the content
> themselves using environment variables and then a foreach loop and a %form
> hash to store the key/value pairs.
> 	Is cgi.pm faster, offer more service that I'm missing (other than
> off-line checking of script - and no, I haven't really read the docs on
> it, but the references to it don't seem to do much that I can't do as fast
> by hand)?

The one thing (trick?) I can think of is that with cgi.pm your data is
supposedly sticky.  The last values you submitted to the form are the
default values the next time.  Otherwise, I'm not sure it really matters
much.  You could very easily do everything by hand, but with cgi.pm you
don't have to do everything yourself. 

I think that like most things there are both advantages and disadvantages.
If you can save some coding time using the cgi.pm module then it is
probably worth using.  If not ... ?

- Wayde
  (wallen at boulder.nist.gov)