| Perl is one of the most
commonly used scripting languages, especially on UNIX platforms. Perl was originally
developed by Larry Wall, with version 1.0 being released to usenet's alt.comp.sources
in 1987. However, since then, many people have contributed to the development
of Perl under the GNU license, making it free to use. We are currently running
Perl version 5.00502, compiled as an Apache module, on
your account with us. The product is available at zero price under the GNU
General Public License (GPL). NetRegister offer to his customers dedicated
servers running the Perl Server at the address http://perl.your-domain-name.com How
to order
This service is already included into the Unlimited
Hosting Plans provided with the Additional
Services. To start the service please go in your Domain
Control Panel and click on Advanced Servers link, and follow the instructions.
The PHP account parameters will be sent immediatly to your preferred email.
This service will be added to the Base Services already included with the domain
transfer/registration.
mod_perl
gives you a persistent Perl interpreter embedded in your web server. This
lets you avoid the overhead of starting an external interpreter and avoids the
penalty of Perl start-up time, giving you super-fast dynamic content.
As you'd
expect from the Perl community, there are hundreds of modules written for mod_perl,
everything from persistent database connections, to templating sytems, to complete
XML content delivery systems.
What is mod_perl?
mod_perl
is the marriage of Apache and Perl !
If you
are new to Perl and want to get some idea of how it works, try reading this short
introductory tutorial: Perl-enabled
web pages are treated just like regular Perl scripts and you can create
and edit them the same way you normally create regular HTML pages. What
do you need?
In this tutorial we assume that NetRegister server has support
for Perl activated and that all files ending in .pl are handled by mod_perl
interpreter. If the server supports mod_perl then you don't need to do anything.
Just create your .pl files and put them in your web directory and the server will
magically parse them for you. There is no need to compile anything nor do you
need to install any extra tools. Think of these Perl-scripting files as simple
HTML files with a whole new family of magical tags that let you do all sorts of
things. Your first Perl-enabled page
Create a file named test.pl under your webserver root directory with the following content:
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# test.pl
#
#
print "<html><head>";
print "<title>Perl Server Test</title>";
print "</head><body bgcolor=#ffffff>";
print "<center><p>";
print "<h1>Perl Server: ready!!!</h1>";
print "</p></center>";
print "</body></html>";
exit(0);
|
The
output of this script will be:
Note that this is not like a CGI script. The file does not need to be executable
or special in any way. Think of it as a normal HTML file which happens to have
a set of special tags available to you that do a lot of interesting things.
This program is extremely simple and you really didn't need to use Perl to create
a page like this. All it does is display: Perl Server: ready!!! using the Perl print statement. If
you tried this example and it didn't output anything, or it prompted for download,
or you see the whole file as text, chances are that the server you are on does
not have Perl enabled. Ask NetRegister to enable it for you using the Hosting
Services. If you want to develop Perl scripts locally, see the downloads section. You can develop locally on any Operating system, be sure to install
an appropriate web server too. The point of the
example is to show the special Perl script format. In this example we used #!/usr/bin/perl
to indicate the start of a Perl script. Then we put the Perl scripting statement and left Perl mode by adding the closing instruction, exit(0);
.
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