What You Have Achieved

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By working through the material in this chapter, you have learned how to do the following things from within Perl scripts:

• How to use DBI to connect to and disconnect from the MySQL server

• How to run queries to add new records, or retrieve, delete, or modify existing records

• How to generate dynamic Web pages using CGI.pm to produce HTML

• How to perform basic Web form-processing operations

• How to perform simple searching

Web servers were initially conceived as a means of transferring files easily to users on remote hosts. Generating dynamic pages as you ve done in this chapter produces a Web serving environment that is fundamentally different. We re still providing information to users, and they re still viewing what appear to be pages in their browsers. But those pages don t originate as static files on the Web server host, they re generated on demand by programs that actively respond to user requirements. In the to-do application, for example, information goes both ways. The user sends information to be stored into the database, and the application pulls information from the database for display to the user. This is a much different, more flexible, and more interactive environment than can be provided using only static HTML pages.

It s also more taxing on the Web server, which becomes responsible not just for opening files and shoving their contents out through network sockets, but for executing programs on behalf of the client. If the server has to execute these programs frequently, the result can be a significant drain on your host s resources. In the next chapter, we ll discuss how to reduce a good deal of this resource consumption.

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