Appendix D. Power and Speed: CGI and mod_perl

What Is mod_perl?

Some people may tell you that CGI scripts are a thing of the past. You should be using PHP, ASP.NET, etc. Not true. The mod_perl module (originally written by Doug MacEachern and licensed under the Apache Software license) gives you a whole new way to create dynamic content by integrating the Apache server and Perl. mod_perl is described as the marriage between Apache and Perl. It is an open source module implemented as a Perl interface to the Apache API and allows existing CGI scripts to run much faster.

By embedding the Perl interpreter right in the Apache server, there is no need to start up (fork) a separate, external interpreter to run CGI programs. In addition, modules and scripts ...

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