|
In the early days of the web, Perl was a very
popular scripting language to develop dynamic applications
for the web. Because of its strong string manipulation capabilities,
it was generally favored as a mechanism to develop CGI scripts
that required a lot of string manipulation to generate the
final HTML.
With its popularity came several nice enhancements
such as mod_perl for Apache, DBI / DBD for database access,
etc. However, using these required several separate downloads
and packaging together sometimes disparate and conflicting
libraries or "modules".
Oracle9iAS
simplifies this significantly by making Perl a "first-class"
citizen and providing all the relevant modules together.
Additional modules are being included in the upcoming release
(Oracle9iAS
v2). A summary of these available modules appears below:
Perl
Interpreter
Oracle HTTP Server, a component
of Oracle9iAS,
includes a perl interpreter already pre-configured at install
time. Thus, no separate download and configuration is required
to begin using this powerful string manipulation language.
mod_perl
The mod_perl module of Oracle HTTP
Server causes a perl interpreter to be loaded in the HTTP
Server's memory space. This special interpreter is able to
load perl applications - and keep them running across requests,
thus again reducing the startup and shutdown overhead, that
was so common in the earlier days of perl and cgi. This provides
a simple migration path for the existing CGI applications.
In addition, this module provides a powerful way to enhance
Oracle HTTP Server's capabilities.
DBI
Support
The database interface is available
as a module to Perl. It provides a de-facto standard API to
access different databases from a perl program.
DBD::Oracle
The DBI module provides database transparency.
This driver module implements the details - and there is a
specific driver module for each database supported. In the
upcoming releases this will provide more globalization support
too.
DBI::Proxy
This module proxies database access
requests to the correct machine, so you do not need to have
native drivers installed on all machines. This reduces the
database driver configuration headaches on multiple machines,
and reduces the need to have these to just one machine. For
example, it will enable accessing an Excel file (on NT) over
ODBC from a UNIX machine, without requiring ODBC drivers be
installed on the UNIX machine.
Other
Utilities: libwww, html, libnet, security
Additional perl modules already bundled
with Oracle9iAS
make it easier to access other web sites without having to
do lower level programming. Moreover, included library facilitates
parsing the returned content (in html) and thus expediting
application development. The libnet library provides access
to several common network protocols, including telnet, ftp,
etc. The security libraries (MIME::Base64, Digest::MD5) allow
for data encryption through the perl programs.
Summary
The continuing additions of new Perl modules
to Oracle9iAS
make it a strong platform for application development in Perl.
This strong string manipulation language makes the task of
building quick dynamic sites from a program quite easy.
. More
Info
Oracle9iAS
Daily Features
|
Bookmark
