Using Web Serving Frameworks

Once you’ve got the four components of a DAMP system running together (you don’t have to do anything for Darwin), you can take advantage of frameworks that use them all together to make dynamic web site creation and maintenance much easier. The following list holds pointers to some of the more popular ones.

AxKit, Maki

AxKit (http://www.axkit.org) and Maki (http://maki.sourceforge.net) are XML-based content delivery systems that use Perl and Python, respectively. These systems allow you to serve XML documents by performing on-the-fly transformations to them (usually to HTML), and boast other nifty features such as automatic document caching.

Mason

Mason (http://www.masonhq.com) is a mod_perl package that lets you build dynamic web sites through file-based components containing a mix of Perl and HTML. Calls to these components can then be placed into HTML files as if they were ordinary HTML tags.

Template Toolkit

The Template Toolkit (http://template-toolkit.org) is similar to Mason, but with more emphasis on defining different page templates, depending upon context. It features its own simple scripting language, rather than Perl.

Zope

Zope (http://www.zope.org) is a highly ambitious all-in-one solution for content management and application serving. It’s written in the Python language.

JaneBuilder

Not really a framework in the same sense as the rest of these, but deserves mention as a shareware Aqua (Carbon) application that helps you create PHP ...

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