How does one build a website in Perl without CGI?

Question

I asked a separate question about Python here, and was told that "classic CGI isn't the best way to use anything at all. With classic CGI server has to spawn a new process for every request"

Now I am working on a Perl-based website using Apache, and all my scripts start with:

use CGI;

Is this a problem? Is there a newer or better way to build a Perl-based website?

Answer 1

Write your website using Plack or a framework built on top of Plack (such as Catalyst or Dancer/Dancer2).

You then have several options to deploy the website. You can deploy it as a CGI script (easy to do, but inefficient), or using FastCGI or Apache's mod_perl, or forget Apache altogether and use a standalone Perl web server such as Starman. Yet another option is uWSGI which is conceptually similar to FastCGI.

Apache's mod_proxy allows you to take a hybrid approach for deployment. Your website could be running on Apache, which could forward requests for particular URLs through to Starman.