[Chicago-talk] Fwd: Perl MySQL question

Thu Mar 26 09:48:40 PDT 2015

If you want a nice table format, simple to get started, check out
datatables.net JQurry plugin.

I used Dancer, Template Toolkit, JQuery and the Datatables plugin. Backend
was Moose and Bread::Board. Run on Linux with DBD::Sybase to connect to
SQLServer. The flavor of DB matters least of all, I believe.

I chose Dancer because it was the quickest way to get started for me at
least. As it grew, the templating of the JavaScript got a little hairy, but
not too bad.

On Thursday, March 26, 2015, Jim Thomason <jim at jimandkoka.com> wrote:

> I'd say that using Catalyst or any other MVC framework (my camp in this
> religious debate would be Mojolicious) is way overkill, especially for an
> initial simple pass. If you just want to get something braindead simple up
> and running lightning fast...
>
> 1) Get some sort of web server installed and configured. apache/nginx/one
> of the myriad perl servers, whatever. Ask your friendly local sysadmin for
> help and/or suggestions, if necessary. And as always, be concerned about
> security if this is public facing.
>
> 2) Enable CGI in some manner - this is usually either enabling scripts in
> a certain directory, or things with a .cgi extension to be executable.
>
> 3) your cgi script is more or less the same as a command line script. If
> you're going to output just plain text (as you would have if you were
> sending to the screen or piping it to a file), just add this to the top:
>
> print "Content-type: text/plain\n\n";
>
> And you're done. That'll spit it out to the web and it'll look exactly the
> same as if you were sending it to a file. HTTP communication is really easy
> if you skirt a few of the rules - it really just needs a Content-type
> header so the browser knows the type of data it's receiving. There's more
> that you -should- do, and I don't suggest you do the above as a production
> run, but to get your feet wet and up and going, this'll have you spitting
> out text to the browser in under an hour.
>
> ...and now that the simple start up pleasantries are out of the way...
>
> First of all, you need to worry about security - make sure that the user
> can't send in arbitrary SQL queries to your server, ESPECIALLY if it's not
> firewalled off for only authorized users. The last thing you'd need is an
> open arbitrary SQL gateway that allows any black hat to come in and run an
> insert/update/drop table/alter table statement. This task is potentially
> non-trivial, but at a minimum, don't write it to accept arbitrary SQL from
> the browser.
>
> The CGI module is pretty popular for the IO requirements here. There are
> myriad other derivatives - CGI::Lite, CGI::Minimal, etc. Use whatever's
> handy. That'll give you better header handling, and simpler processing for
> reading in options passed by the user.
>
> Next, to pretty it up, templating libraries like Text::Template or
> HTML::Template can help layout an interface for you.
>
> You may need login/user capabilities. You can do that with CGI and
> templating yourself, but it's a lot of infrastructure you need to set up.
> One of the frameworks may be more useful for you at this point.
>
> Nowadays, it's also very trendy to have your web front ends be javascript
> apps that handle all the layout and interface, and your communication back
> and forth to the server is all done by handing JSON objects or XML. So you
> might want to look into that as well. On the one hand, it makes the web
> front end more complicated and brings in different languages, but on the
> other it can keep the server side a lot simpler if you're only handing data
> structures back and forth to the client and letting the client side handle
> all the interaction.
>
> -Jim...
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 9:30 AM, Alan Mead <amead2 at alanmead.org
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','amead2 at alanmead.org');>> wrote:
>
>>  Richard,
>>
>> I think that most people will tell you to use a web-based framework and
>> some of them are optimized for this.
>>
>> But it's pretty simple to create a single-page CGI that displays some
>> data and there are many examples available online.  I find HTML::Template
>> to have a fairly easy interface for creating HTML tables from DBI queries.
>> Probably a key issue is how much other infrastrcture you need.  For
>> example, if people need to login, that's going to make a simple CGI a bad
>> idea.
>>
>> -Alan
>>
>>
>>
>> On 3/26/2015 8:59 AM, Richard Reina wrote:
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: Richard Reina <gatorreina at gmail.com
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','gatorreina at gmail.com');>>
>> Date: 2015-03-26 8:15 GMT-05:00
>> Subject: Perl MySQL question
>> To: chicago-talk at pm.org
>> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','chicago-talk at pm.org');>
>>
>>
>>  Hello All,
>>
>> What would be the easiest way to display query results from a MySQL
>> database -- running on a Debian machine -- onto a webpage. What I would
>> like is to allow a user to log in and be able to do a few simple queries. I
>> know enough perl and SQL to write the queries via perl->DBI but I have
>> never done any web programing. What I mean is that I have written a lot of
>> perl programs that query databases and display the results on a console
>> screen via curses but never displayed results onto the www. I'm guessing
>> that I might need to install Apache but really have no clue beyond that.
>>
>>
>>  PS It does not have to be anything fancy.
>>
>>  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>>  Richard
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>>
>> --
>>
>> Alan D. Mead, Ph.D.
>> President, Talent Algorithms Inc.
>>
>> science + technology = better workers
>>
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>>
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>>
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>
>

-- 
Regards,
Sean

Sean Blanton
sean at blanton.com
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