Perl CGI with AS/400?

[Cory Rau]

I'm new to Perl...just took an Intro To Perl course and will take a Perl CGI course in February. For the past few months, I've been combing the web for some definitive answers to a couple of questions.

Here's what I *want* to do....

We just redesigned our corporate web site and I'd like to use our AS/400 as a backend to execute product searches and take catalog requests. I've got two machines...a Win 2000 box with ActivePerl and ODBC drivers for the AS/400 and a Mac OS X 10.2 machine with basically nothing but Perl 5.8.

I'd like to be able to run the web site on an OS X machine but I'm starting to doubt it's possible. I don't have any ODBC drivers listed in the ODBC Administrator utility on the Mac and was told by a sales rep at OpenLink that to connect to the AS/400, it would cost roughly $4000...that's only because it's an AS/400 and I'd need to implement a two-tier solution.

Can anyone tell me definitely whether or not the OS X solution is a non-starter?

My second question is actually Windows based so I realize this isn't the optimal place for it but I figured someone might know the answer.

We run JD Edwards software so Client Access ODBC drivers for the AS/400 are already on my machine. Like I said, I've got ActivePerl 5.8. I've installed DBD::ODBC too. Can I achieve my goal with this set up? High performance would be icing on the cake but that's not my main concern at the moment though I've also looked into getting the DBD::DB2 driver but the requirements say I need either DB2 Software Developer's Kit Version 5.2 or DB2 Application Development Client installed to run it (I'm looking into getting those). I'll stop there since I don't want to take up too much space with Windows stuff but if anyone knows anything about this set-up, I'd really appreciate some advice.

Sorry for the long message,
Cory Rau
Edwin B. Stimpson Co., Inc.