At 10:26 PM -0700 6/27/01, Barbara S. Chapman wrote:
>I am looking for perl scripts to use with a college course website. The
>development of the site is being done on a mac (a powerbook running Perl
>5.2.0r4). The site will be initially hosted on Earthlink (unix) and
>possibly moved to the university server (also unix) in the Fall for the
>beginning of the course. The scripts need to be called from html pages and
>run essentially the same way on macperl and unix perl.
>
>
>1) a flexible site-search tool that will work on a site with heavy technical
>vocabulary (computational molecular biology).
Probably some sort of subclass of WWW:Search, I'd think...
>2) a logon tool to validate, authorize or register a site user. Most
>students and co-instructors will be accessing the pages from their personal
>internet accounts, so we can't use an edu domain filter -- each user will
>need to have a verifiable username and password. Security is not a top
>priority, but we plan to post some copyrighted course materials, and would
>like to create an interactive, collegial atmosphere for the registered
>participants.
Site security is best handled by the webserver, not by a script.
Most webservers allow specifying something like a 'realm', which is a
collection of secured pages and the user/passwds that can access
those pages. It may be easier to deploy on the university server
from the beginning, just in terms of access to technical support.
But I'm not an Earthlink customer, so I don't know that for sure.
-Jeff Lowrey
