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Strategy for this tutorial
To teach the basics of perl, as new concepts are introduced, we'll incorporate them into an evolving script that you'll be able to take home and use.
The script we'll be writing, called mailform,
will be useful to anyone who has wanted to create some interactive
pages on the World Wide Web. Web servers usually support running
auxilary programs to facilitate interactive content. There is a
standard called CGI (Common Gateway Interface) which defines a
minimum set of environment variables that the program can use to
determine its response.
The program we write will take the results of an HTML form and mail the values to a specified person. Writing the HTML for this form is beyond the scope of this course, but a sample form will be provided.
The beauty of this program is that any user on the web server can use it to respond to their forms - you don't need to give everyone access to your server configuration. Users will enable themselves for this program, and then can write arbitrary forms for anyone on the web to fill out.
Example
The script will evolve as concepts are introduced, and will always be at the bottom of the bage, under a horizontal rule, with the title Example, just as this paragraph is.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
johnsonb@ncsa.uiuc.edu
Last modified: June 19, 1997