[Techtalk] cgi vs client-side scripts

[Patricia Fraser]

Hi folks,

another off-the-wall question; gotta love this OS, such fun to play 
with!

A friend and I are developing a GPL project together, with a MySQL back 
end, for live fish producers to do inventory, shipping, export 
documentation with (fish exporting is her background, but she loves 
tinkering with computers as well). We want it to be multi-platform, so 
we plan to use a browser front end and something in the middle in the 
way of scripts to talk to the database & do Stuff. It needs to run on 
Windoze because most of the folk in the industry will have that on 
their PCs, from the info we have.

We would kind of like to develop the initial app without having to use 
Apache, since mostly, initially at least, it would run on stand-alone 
systems and those that aren't stand-alone would be pretty insecure (ie, 
security not controllable by us); that seems to require Javascript in 
the HTML and then some sort of Perl middleware to talk to the database. 
We want to lock the browser down (thinking of using Mozilla as part of 
the package) so we're not using just whatever browser people have.

If we *have* to use Apache to save such a kludge, then we have to; 
maybe down the track we'll look at something networkable, but we'll 
need more expertise before we go there...

I've been scouring around for info, and have quite a bit, but I'm 
hoping that someone here can point me towards resources, or give me 
some tips on what's possible. Should we be looking at PHP or Perl (I'm 
leaning towards Perl), or what?

I should note that neither of us has ever written a line of Perl, PHP,
Javascript or SQL in our lives, and we're looking forward to having the 
hell of a lot of fun...

Cheers!
-- 
Trish Fraser, Sunbury, Australia
trish at thefrasers.org
www.computerbank.org.au