Databreeze Platform Analysis

Perl: The Best Web Programming language

Perl is an Open Source cross-platform programming language that is both simple yet powerful. Perl was one of the first languages used in CGI Web programming and remains one of the most popular programming language in use on the Web today.

Perl was designed for text manipulation, formatting, extraction and file I/O. These are part of the reasons why Perl has always been the best language for generating dynamic Web pages 'on the fly'. Information on Perl can be found at www.perl.com

DataBreeze is built out of Perl because it is the best language for creating Web Applications. DataBreeze is designed to be extended through the use of Event Functions written in Perl. Event Functions are used when the standard system functionality does not provide the solution needed.

Perl Modules CGI.pm and DBI.pm

Perl comes with many modules that provide considerable flexibility. DataBreeze utilizes two modules that combine to provide important HTML generation functionality as well as Database connectivity.

Note that many other Perl modules are supplied and compiled in to Perl by default. More Perl modules can be found at the CPAN Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

• CGI.pm - http://stein.cshl.org/WWW/software/CGI/cgi_docs.html
  CGI.pm simplifies the process of creating CGI applications with Perl, providing an Object Oriented interface for easy usability

• DBI.pm - http://dbi.symbolstone.org/
  DBI is a standardized format for connecting to and exchanging information with a Database Server. DBI requires a DBD driver for each specific database:
  • DBD::MySQL - http://www.mysql.com/downloads/api-dbi.html
    The MySQL DBD driver provides an object-oriented interface between Perl and MySQL

General Perl Benefits

• An interpreted language for quick and easy programming.
• Extremely fast for an interpreted language
• Near 'C' level speed when combined with mod_perl
• Unmatched for text manipulation, extraction, I/O and printing - the basis of dynamic web pages
• CPAN Comprehensive Perl Archive Network provides a huge number of free library modules.

Perl Programming Benefits

• Built-in hashes and regular expression matching
• Flexible, non-typed pointers, no data types
• Automatically allocates/de-allocates memory
• Function parameter passing as arrays or hashes
• Object oriented functionality with multiple inheritance, overloading, etc.