[rochester-pm-list] Re: Perl Webpage Publishing Systems

[Shawn Porter]

On Mon, 15 Feb 1999, David Simcik wrote:
> Hmmmm...this may not help to clarify and will sound a bit rudimentary, but
> here goes. If you look at any "big" portal site say, CNET or ZDNET, you'll
> notice that their URL's have Perl parameters in them, 

Dave, I think you may be confusing Perl with CGI.  The stuff after the ?
in a URL is used to send data to a program running on the webserver.  That
program isn't necessarily written in Perl.

> even though though they
> are not passing form data. 

There are two types of CGI requests: GET and POST.  With a GET, all the
info is encoded into the URL.  Both a GET and POST can be created w/o
using a form.

> In essence, this is how they manage their archive
> of thousands of articles
> at their sites. I can only assume this type of script would be placed under
> the category of "document management" or "document publishing". Maybe it's
> just a template built in Perl that they use to maintain consistency?

I doubt they do all this in Perl.  My guess is that they have some other
document management system written in C or C++ or something.  Anybody else
know how they run this?

> Here's an example from Webmonkey:
> http://www.hotwired.com/webmonkey/perl/?tw=perl
> 
> And CNET:
> http://www.cnet.com/Content/Gadgets/Special/DigitalTV/?st.cn.fd.gen.gp
> 
> But then again, here's an example URL from DevHead (doesn't look like a
> parameter, but what does it all mean???):
> http://www.zdnet.com/devhead/stories/articles/0,4413,1600169,00.html
> 
> I hope that helps to clarify a little. I think what I'm going for here is some
> sort of document management automation. I think I also just confused the hell
> out of lot of people!
> 
> Thanks again.
> Dave

You may want to check out PHP or something like that.  If you're still
running RH Linux, check your dist CD for rpms to install mod_php for
Apache.  I don't know the URL for info on PHP, but I'm sure you can find
it.

--
Shawn Porter
http://www.rit.net/sporter
(716) 889-7346
(716) 889-0954
sporter at rit.net