perlquestion Cody Fendant <p>I have built lots of sites based on perl with CGI.pm and MySQL. I'm self-taught (with the Monks' help) rather than a professional programmer.</p> <p>However all of these sites have been on a stock web hosting account on an Apache server, with the simple model of: </p> <ul> <li>browser requests URL</li> <li>perl runs script at that URL (mostly using .htaccess and rewrite to fake "directories" so that <code>/foo/bar/</code> is really <code>?x=foo&y=bar</code>)</li> <li>Apache serves up content after the script runs</li> <li>script goes away</li> </ul> <p>What I don't quite get is how the next, more professional kind of web app works, things based on Catalyst or Mojolicious etc. My question include, but are not limited to:</p> <ul> <li>Do they require <code>mod_perl</code>? </li> <li>How do you start and stop them? </li> <li>Can I run this kind of self-contained app-and-server system on regular commercial hosting or do I need a VPS type setup where I'm root? </li> <li>What happens if they crash or the server gets rebooted, etc?</li> <li>Where is Plack in all this?</li> <li>Could I easily convert my CGI-type sites to this model?</li> <li>What makes this system better? Catalyst tutorials all say you <i>can</i> run the thing as CGI but it's not recommended.</li> </ul> <p>As I said, I am totally confident in creating websites the "old" ("dumb"?) way, but this next step is a big gap in my knowledge. Is there a book or a tutorial aimed at taking me to that next level? Or can someone here sum it up succinctly?</p> <p> <b>UPDATE</b>:</p> <ul><li> I'm getting the idea that it's not more professional to create web apps this way, simply that the frameworks are big, and that they're slow if you don't. </li> <li> I roughly get what Plack is now. </li> <li> Three of my questions has been answered, I now know that you stop/start them as servers the way you can start/stop your Apache with apachectl and you make sure they restart with the server by setting up your <code>/etc/init.d</code> just the way you set up your FTP daemon or whatever, so you need that level of control. </li> </ul>