[rochester-pm-list] Perl Webpage Publishing Systems

[Brian Mathis]

Well, there's a few things going on here, let me try to separate them.

First, the "perl" parameters you mention, are actually CGI parameters. 
Don't confuse the two. Perl is a programming language.  CGI defines an
interface from the web to your program.  A program that uses CGI can be
written in any language, like Perl, C, Java, etc.  The CGI parameters
that you see in the URL, are actually part of the specification, and
show up as "pathinfo".  Any type of program that reads pathinfo can use
it.  This is actually considered a type of form data.

The next part, is what happens on the server side.  You probably have
heard of "virtual directories".  These are directories that are set up
in the web server, which, when accessed by, for example
http://localhost/directory, actually bring up a directory located
somewhere else, say /data/documents.  Well, this also works for
server-side plugins.  You can define a specific virtual directory to
actually execute a program (CGI) or send info through a particular
handler in the server.  You can use the pathinfo to pass additional
information to the program. 

This brings us to what many of these sites do.  There are packages out
there, one of them is called "storyboard", I believe, which is set up to
run like this virtual directory / program.  Storyboard also provides and
interface to a database, where most of the articles, images, etc.. are
stored.  It puts everything together into predefined templates, then
serves out an html page for you to view.  The pathinfo provides the
information to storyboard as to which article to show you.

Most of these types of sites probably use a commercial system such as
storyboard to serve their sites.  Also, most of them probably aren't
written in Perl, as they need to handle many more requests. It is, of
course, possible, and also relatively simple, to write a system like
this in Perl.  Document management is something that is sorely needed on
the web, not only for large sites, but also for the smaller ones.

I hope this helps clear things up.
Brian Mathis