Do you hide .pl extension on web pages?

[punch_card_don]

Motley Monks,

If you're using a Perl templating system to serve web pages, the url displayed in the browser is often going to look something like

http://www.mysite.com/cgi-bin/my_templating_script.pl?page=thepage

How many people care enough about displaying cleaner urls to bother doing anything about this? And if you do, what do you do?

Thanks.

[MidLifeXis]

I tend to abstract the endpoint, named as what I want it to do, not named as what does it. I also use mod_rewrite for applications not able to handle the rewrite within (vendor CGI, for example).

Allows me to do things like http://example.com/api/parts/ instead of http://example.com/vendor_endpoint/getAllParts.cgi.....

If our vendor changes, their implementation changes, they have a hardcoded endpoint (.../cgi-bin/..., for example), or we add a layer in front of the vendor's implementation (say for another parts database), I am able to add that into the system without the client application (or the user) knowing the difference. It does require some planning and maintenance on your endpoints. I use it because it isolates our API from the implementation of our API.

[choroba]

Use Dancer and your url can be something like

http://www.mysite.com/question/q4

[Tommy]

Right. I use Perl Catalyst and this isn't an issue. Using an MVC for your web application is definitely the way to go. I was a die-hard CGI guy for several years, but after having used a real MVC web application framework, I wouldn't do it any other way. The scalability is mind-blowing.

[punch_card_don]

Die-hard CGI guy - yes, that's it. But, after suffering the indignity of having my example called "a really old school URL", I'm thinking it's time to join the 2010's.

I've been reading about Dancer today. What's not clear to me is - it's a module you download from CPAN an install, but it sounds like a server, for example "listening" on a port. The intro slides on the Dancer website offer this seemingly oxymoronic explanation: "A Dancer script is a webserver."

Script or webserver?

Anyone?

Thanks.

[suaveant]

Are you in Linux? I'm not sure about Windows but certainly in Apache under Linux if you specify a directory as a script directory you don't need any extension, or can use whatever. The script just needs to be executable with the shebang.

That being said almost nothing of ours actually runs Perl as a CGI directly because it is too damn slow that way, our stuff is basically all FastCGI with C cgi accessors.

[blue_cowdawg]

How many people care enough about displaying cleaner urls to bother doing anything about this? And if you do, what do you do?

Myself the idea of hiding a ".pl" extension on a URL gets a non-committal "meh."

If I were really interested in doing that I supposed I could symlink to a filename devoid of the .pl but that might not work depending on how the server is configured. (I'll have to try that later.)

I see plenty of other examples of "unclean URLs" such as the Wall Street Journal's website and others...

[CountZero]

Yes that is a really "old school" URL, but actually who cares? Nobody is ever going to have to type that URL in the address bar of the browser. All you need is an easy URL to the first page and then it is just all clicking on links.

Half of my colleagues in the office don't even know what an URL is and never use the address bar: they just type the URL in the Google search box and then click their way to the site.

[Melly]

Wouldn't using a mod_rewrite in apache be the way to go with this?

That said, I know you can use it to redirect foo to foo.php, but I'm not sure if you can use it to hide .php

... or maybe you can? Take a look at: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1992183/how-to-hide-the-html-extension-with-apache-mod-rewrite

[jhourcle]

If you do a rewrite of the URL (the [R] option), it will be shown to the client.

If you proxy them ([P]), it won't.

However, you could also use mod_negotiation's Multiviews so that when a URL comes in, it'll look for files with an extension if there isn't an extensionless version. The problem comes when you have both 'foo.php' and 'foo.pl' or 'foo.cgi', you might not have what you expected being served (without some extra effort to set the priorities)

[tobyink]

I generally use something like mod_rewrite.

Yes, I consider this an important thing to do, as it gives me the freedom to restructure the internals of the site without changing any of the public URLs.

[davido]

I don't need to hide it; I use Mojolicious (official website). Mojolicious routes are fantastic (though they can be a little confusing at first, particularly if you need things like bridges).

[DrHyde]

I don't care what my URLs look like, but for new code I'm generally using Dancer these days so they look all shiny and modern anyway without me having to get angry at mod_rewrite.

[sundialsvc4]

Customarily, yes, I do.

[Anonymous Monk]

your web server is responsible for that url, so use whatever you like

CGI::Emulate::PSGI if you want to Plack it up and customize