I've implemented what I believe to be a novel technique for
dymanic web page generation. Although explained in much more
detail here:
http://www.best.com/~pjl/software/html_tree/
essentially it parses an HTML file into a DOM-like tree where a
"visitor" function is called for every node in the tree. The
parser in written in C++ using mmap(2) for speed, but there is
a Perl XS layer and Apache mod_perl module. Using the Apache
module, you can bind HTML CLASS attributes to functions via a
class map that is simpy a Perl hash.
The novel thing about this is that pure, standard HTML files
are used. This allows one to create a mock-up of the page
complete with dummy data to see how it will look and then take
that same page, without modification, and have it used to
generate dynamic content. The code behind the page is in a
separate .pm file (that is cached similarly to the way
Apache::Registry does it).
- Paul
