[Melbourne-pm] Run Perl Script from HTML

Gerd Berner gberner at intraspect.com.au
Thu Sep 24 05:19:11 PDT 2009


Hello all

A number of responses already - Thanks!

I should perhaps provide a few more details.  I need to provide a very  
simple graphing application.  A number of clients will be receiving a  
CSV file on a weekly basis and need to be able to graph and trend a  
number of the fields against a date field which is also included in  
the file.

Requirements:

- Cannot assume that the receivers will have MS office (or else they  
could possibly use Excel or Access)
- There will be no Webserver available
- Needs to work on Windows, Linux, Mac
- cannot assume any particular web browser


Anthony Fisher suggested - 'There's no general way to do this (AFAIK),  
but if you're targetting only IE on Windows you could use ActiveX.'    
- I don't want to restrict to IE.

Michael Potter suggested -' Have a Perl script constantly running in  
the background and updating the graph as a PNG on disk or whatever.  
The use Javascript to reload the page (I am assuming here that  
Javascript can be used to reload a page from disk)'. - I thought this  
might be a solution, but I need to pass parameters to the perl script.

Scott Penrose suggested -  'You have to have some form of code on the  
server to enable you to run Perl.

E.g. you can embed perl, similar to PHP into an HTML page if you  
enable something like Mason, Template, or other server side code.
You could also consider executing script with SSI (Service Side  
Include) if that can be enabled via Apache.
Or of course you can just enable a CGI, and embed it using one of many  
methods, one of which could even be an iframe.

Otherwise I can see no way in HTML to embed something.

Now, because you mentioned Workstations, there may be an alternative,  
e.g. XUL - I don't think you can do it directly with HTML on a  
browser, but maybe with XUL in Firefox.

Another way, depending on the technology, like where you get the data,  
could be by another language, such as XSL or Javascript, both of which  
can work directly in browsers.'


I was hoping for a way to provide a HTML interface and a Perl script,  
packaged up to fulfill all the requirements, but it looks like it wont  
be that simple.  I think it might be a job for Tk, which I was trying  
to avoid.


Thanks very much for your help.


Cheers

Gerd
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