Perl and CGI - simple form, and monitoring script.

In some ways, Perl and CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is "old hat", but some times it's still just what you need.

Over the last couple of days, I've been working with Perl, with a customer for an intermediate tutorial session on some aspects of the language such as Object Orientation and Regular Expressions, and we touched on "can I send the output through to a browser too". Yes, of course, and CGI is neat and straightforward for the task; we don't need scookies, sessions, frameworks, MVC or the like - just simple displays and perhaps the odd form (and we do need to consider the web security!).

Two source code examples with links to demonstrations ...

1. A simple form which the user fills in with a height and a width. Reply gives the area, echos back inputs too. Script has "injection attack" protection to avoid use entering something silly - you need that even on the simplest of scripts. [see demo]

2. An administrator's tool to keep an eye on the server - the uptime report, disc utilisation, and the status of another server too, checked via a ping. [see demo]

(written 2011-09-17)

Associated topics are indexed as below, or enter http://melksh.am/nnnn for individual articles

P604 - Using Perl for Web Site Management
  [314] What language is this written in? - (2005-05-17)
  [2399] Firefighting with Perl - (2009-09-07)
  [2532] Analysing Google arrivals by country of origin - (2009-12-10)

P403 - Perl - The Common Gateway Interface
  [45] CGI v mod_perl - (2004-09-11)
  [2238] Handling nasty characters - Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, Lua - (2009-06-14)
  [2551] Perl and the Common Gateway Interface - out of fashion but still very useful? - (2009-12-26)
  [2834] Teaching examples in Perl - third and final part - (2010-06-27)

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