NAME
CIPP - CgI Perl Preprocessor
SYNOPSIS
This module is a preprocessor for the CIPP language. To use
it you need either CGI::CIPP, Apache::CIPP or new.spirit.
Please download the packages from CPAN (new.spirit is also
available at http://www.dimedis.de/ ) and refer to their
documentation for details.
So this SYNOPSIS is empty... ;)
DESCRIPTION
CIPP is a Perl module for translating CIPP sources to pure
Perl programs. CIPP defines a HTML embedding language also
called CIPP which has powerful features for CGI and database
developers.
Many standard CGI and database operations (and much more)
are covered by CIPP, so the developer does not need to code
them again and again.
CIPP is useful in two ways. One aproach is to let CIPP generate
standalone CGI scripts, which only need a little environment to
run (some configuration files). If you want to use CIPP in this
way: there is a complete development environment called spirit
which supports you in many ways, to develop such CGI programms
with CIPP. spirit can be downloaded from CPAN, but is only free
for non commercial usage.
The second is to use the Apache::CIPP or CGI::CIPP modules.
These let you execute CIPP sources transparently inside
your webserver document tree. They define request handlers
for CIPP sources, so they will be executed in an Apache or
CGI environment on the fly. The Apache module needs mod_perl,
implements a two-level preprocessing and Perl Compiler cache
and provides great performance. The CGI module runs with
any webserver and uses the standard CGI interface for
communication.
Development started spring 1997 at dimedis GmbH, Germany.
It improved over the time while used in several projects.
Since early 1999 this module is Open Source software and
published on CPAN.
SIMPLE EXAMPLE
Here is a (really) simple example of using CIPP in a HTML
source to retrieve some information from a database. Think
this as a HTML page which is "executed" on the fly by
Apache::CIPP or CGI::CIPP. If you use new.spirit the source
will be translated to a standalone CGI program.
Note: there is no code to connect to the database. This is
done implicitely. The configuration is taken from Apache,
from a small CGI::CIPP wrapper program or from a global
configuration file.
# print table of users who match the given parameter
tiny litte CIPP example
Users matching '$search_name'
PREREQUISITES
CIPP itself needs perl 5.004_04 or better. To use its database
interface you need the DBI module (somewhat better than version
0.97) and a DBD-module for your database system.
CIPP is a pure Perl module, so you need no C compiler.
WHICH PLATFORMS ARE SUPPORTED
CIPP runs on any Unix system with a perl interpreter.
Also you can use it under Win32, it is widely tested with
the ActiveState Perl distribution and also in production
usage on this platform.
There is special Apache webserver support through the module
Apache::CIPP. You can use CIPP on any CGI capable webserver
using either CGI::CIPP or new.spirit.
DOWNLOAD CIPP
CIPP and friends can be downloaded from CPAN
$CPAN/modules/by-authors/id/J/JR/JRED/
INSTALLING CIPP
perl Makefile.PL
make
make test
make install
DOCUMENTATION
There is some technical information about the interface
of CIPP embedded as POD in CIPP.pm. This section is in
german language only. But usually you need not to care about
the internal mechanisms of CIPP.
The CIPP language reference manual can be downloaded from CPAN
as a extra package. This is usefull, because the format of the
documentation is PDF and the uncompressed file has more than
500kb. Also not every modification of CIPP leads to modification
of the documentation.
The CIPP::Manual module is part of this distribution. It is
a excerpt of the english PDF documention containing only the
command reference chapter. You can read this manual using perldoc:
perldoc CIPP::Manual
SUPPORTED LANGUAGES
When CIPP development started early 1997 it was intended to be
a tool for internal usage only. So the whole documentation was
written in german.
Since September 1999 CIPP has multilanguage support for its
error messages. Also the documentation has been translated
to english. The german documentation is not longer maintained.
BUG REPORTING
Please send any bug reports or comments to
cipp@dimedis.de
README REVISION
$Id: README,v 1.6 2000/08/10 13:00:55 joern Exp $
CREDITS
Martin H. Sluka for his STICKY idea
in some formular tags
AUTHOR
Joern Reder
COPYRIGHT
Copyright (C) 1999 by Joern Reder and
dimedis GmbH, 50672 Koeln, Germany
All Rights Reserved.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.