[thelist] Perl vs PerlScript (clueless newbie)

[David Kaufman]

Sean G <ethanol at mathlab.sunysb.edu> wrote:
> Howdy,

hi Sean,

> Crawling out of my microsoft-induced haze, I'm setting up MySQL and
> Perl

Congratulations!

> ...on windows 2003.  (baby steps :)

Oh... :-)

> I... have some trouble I think is related to semantics.

Yes I think you're right.


> My understanding is Perl is the framework or language, and a perl
> script is a program.  (Yes, I know there is a difference between a
> script and a program.  I just painting with broad strokes here.)

Actually, i would say (though some may have another notion) that a "perl
script" is the same thing as a "perl program".  the only difference in
my mind is that I tend to associate the term "script" with the file it
resides in and the "program" as the code in the file.  for instance, i i
paste the foo program (source code) that i wrote into a foo.pl script,
or a bar.cgi script.

> My questions is, what is the difference between a 'perl script' and
> 'PerlScript'?

big difference there.  a perl script is (see above) essentially a file
containing perl source code which requires a perl interpreter to execute
(perl.exe, on windows which is open source).

"PerlScript" is the name of Activestate's proprietary implementation of
a Windows Scripting Host language engine.  It can be used to embed a
perl interpreter into a browser (as an ActiveX or OLE control) and IIS
(as an NSAPI.dll) but please don't ask how to do either of those
things - I have no idea.

> I'm looking for server side execution requiring nothing from the
> client beyond a web browser, which I think means Perl.  On the other
> hand PerlScript is executed on the client, and on windows requires
> something like ActivePerl, right?   Am I even close?

Well, I can't help you much if your webserver is Microsoft IIS, but if
you're running Apache on windows, the setup if fairly straightforward.
You only need to install Apache, and ActiveState perl, but when you
*install* ActiveState perl, be advised that you do *not* need to install
all of it's optional components, such as the PerlScript COM/OLE/ActiveX
thingy, etc. just to do web development.

Fortunately the path you're on is pretty well-travelled.  Google WAMP,
an acronym for windows-centric LAMP development (LAMP being Linux Apache
MySQL and Perl/PHP/Python) web dev tools.

And good luck!  if^H^H When you get frustrated, consider actually
running Perl, Apache and MySQL on a Linux box (perhaps with Samba for
windows file sharing) next to your Windows box.  RedHat and Fedora are
quite easy Linux distros to install (these days) ...this is how I began
my migration: Debian Linux in text mode, no X Windows GUI stuff - just a
webserver.  There's a lot more help and support resources out there for
LAMP than there is for WAMP :-)

-dave