When we last left our intrepid web developer, he had successfully set up an online sales catalogue in 11 lines of code. Now, however, he has to move on to turning this into a sales site with a shopping…
You have a database. You have a web server. You have a deadline. Whether it’s bringing up an e-commerce storefront for a new venture, implementing a new front-end to HR’s employee database, or even providing a neat way to…
For the past few months, my former employers and I have been working on a port of the Java Lucene search engine toolkit. On the February 3rd, Plucene was released to the world, implementing almost all of the functionality…
Recently we heard from Kake Pugh about the OpenGuides project, a wiki-based collaborative city guide system; previously, we heard from Brian Ingerson about his Kwiki wiki implementation. Guides, wikis, blogs … the new fashion in software engineering at the…
One of the most boring programming tasks in the world has to be pulling data out of a database and displaying it on a web site. Yet it’s also one of the most ubiquitous. Perl programmers being lazy, there…
Scratching Your Own Itch Some time ago I became intrigued with Digest authentication, which uses the same general mechanism as the familiar Basic authentication scheme but offers significantly more password security without requiring an SSL connection. At the time…
Last time, we looked at writing a simple Apache output filter - Apache::Clean - using the mod_perl 2.0 API. How did I know that the filter I presented really worked? I wrote a test suite for it, one that…
This article is about a new Perl module called CGI::Kwiki. With this module you can create a Wiki Web site in less than a minute. Now that’s quick. Or more appropriately, ``That’s Kwik!’’ If you’ve not heard of a…
Not too long ago, despite a relative dearth of free tuits, I decided that I had put off my investigation of mod_perl 2.0 for too long - it was time to really start kicking the tires and tinkering with…
Stas Bekman is a coauthor of O’Reilly’s upcoming Practical mod_perl. It’s important to be able to monitor your production system’s health. You want to monitor the memory and file system utilization, the system load, how much memory the processes…
In this article we continue talking about how to optimize your site for performance without touching code, buying new hardware or telling casts. A few simple httpd.conf configuration changes can improve the performance tremendously. Choosing MinSpareServers, MaxSpareServers and StartServers…
Correct configuration of the MinSpareServers, MaxSpareServers, StartServers, MaxClients, and MaxRequestsPerChild parameters is very important. There are no defaults. If they are too low, then you will underutilize the system’s capabilities. If they are too high, then chances are that…
Disclaimer: As you know, each month I try to review a recently published Perl book, and I aim to cover all the majors as they come out. The book that’s fallen onto my desk for review this month is…
Screen-scraping is the process of emulating an interaction with a Web site - not just downloading pages, but filling out forms, navigating around the site, and dealing with the HTML received as a result. As well as for traditional…
It’s desirable to avoid forking under mod_perl, as when you do, you are forking the entire Apache server - lock, stock and barrel. Not only is your Perl code and Perl interpreter being duplicated, but so is mod_ssl, mod_rewrite,…
Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams are the authors of Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason. Mason is a powerful framework for generating dynamic text, and is especially useful when creating complex, featureful Web sites. For those (hopefully few) folks…
Sharing Memory As we have learned in the previous article, sharing memory helps us save memory with mod_perl, giving us a huge speed increase; but we pay the price with a big memory footprint. I presented a few techniques to…
As with most of my previous articles, this one grew out of a project at my $DAY_JOB. The project du-jour involves large dependency graphs, often containing thousands of nodes and edges. Some of the relationships are automatically generated and…
It seems every month or so, there’s a new Perl and CGI book out; huge thick volumes promising to teach you all you need to know about programming for the Web in 24 hours. They all start with “Hello…
Sean M. Burke is the author of Perl & LWP Introduction LWP (short for “Library for WWW in Perl”) is a popular group of Perl modules for accessing data on the Web. Like most Perl module-distributions, each of LWP’s component modules…
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