I recently purchased a business (a comic book store) that I want to modernize in a big way. I need both an effective point of sale system, and a complete online storefront. I want to use Perl, for obvious reasons, but find myself wondering whether to totally build a custom system using CGI::Application and HTML::Template, or to use something like RedHat Interchange as a platform and concentrate on customizing that.

My main concern is to spend as little time reinventing the wheel as possible, yet have a design that will scale well when and if needed to. The fact that I can rebuild an Interchange server from official vendor CDs is also a plus to me. Is there another Free appserver out there that uses Perl and is better supported?

I'm also looking for any info in general about linking my application to credit-card processing software. Are there Perl modules to do this sort of thing, or am I stuck with whatever the credit card companies dictate?

thanks in advance.

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