Friday, March 4, 2011

Mac OSX and CGI.pm

"I'm NOT a web developer!"  I've been saying that a lot lately.  Even so, because I have done a bit of LDAP programming and they needed a web interface, I wrote a quick hack which turned into a big, long painful project.  The biggest issue is so many things don't work the same (or at all) on Mac OSX.  OpenLDAP, for instance (a whole other story). [It should be noted - I'm also not a Mac guy.]

Dilbert.com

I tried for several days to get CGI.pm redirects and refreshes to work but kept getting Error 302's.  I found lots of people with the same issue on the Mac.   Finally - someone said "You'll have to write it without CGI.pm because it doesn't 100% work on the Mac (and/or maybe the Apple Apache config was incriminated).  Anyway, I rewrote the redirects without CGI.pm (ugly, inelegant Perl 4ish looking code) and it worked fine.

Since I never exactly found the answer - I want to state for future folks looking for an answer - "IT DOESN'T WORK RIGHT ON A MAC" (this phrase can be re-used for a great many things).  And, if I'm wrong (because, remember, I'm not a web developer) it'd be great for someone to comment with the right answer.

I'll probably get comments such as "You're using CGI.pm for web development?!  Are you from the past?!" To this I would say "Yes I am".
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2 comments:

  1. CareyMarch 6, 2011 at 11:34 AM

    Not entirely clear from your post what you used instead of CGI.pm. But should you need to do web stuff again, I encourage you to spend a few minutes and look at some of the micro frameworks that speak PSGI (a good list of them at the Plack site). This is a nice, modern interface, and there are some lovely tools that work with it. I've had good luck with Dancer, but there are so many it's hard to recommend anything specifically. You really should decide for yourself.

    As an aside, if you want a statement that applies to even more situations, I would suggest "IT DOESN'T WORK THE SAME ON A MAC." And of course, you can replace MAC with any other operating system. Because they all do things a bit differently--isn't that kind of the point of different operating systems?

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  2. RATMarch 7, 2011 at 1:44 PM

    Uh, yeah, I was in a pretty rotten mood when I wrote that post. :-) I ran across Dancer mid-way when I started pondering "What are Perl folk using for web development these days." I think I heard of Plack - maybe at YAPC - but I hadn't yet checked it out. Both look very interesting. I so seldom do any web development that I haven't bothered to bring my skills up to the 21st century. I'll definitely check them out. Thanks for the ideas!

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