Hi,

This is Taco.  It is a system originally designed to generate web
pages with dynamic content, but it can be useful in other situations
too - for example, you might want to use it to generate form letters
or something.

Taco is a framework that does query string & forms processing,
argument passing, and template management.  It lets you write your own
Perl code, put it in a "Taco module" (a Perl module that's a subclass
of Taco::Module), and then call that code from inside a web page.

Taco is completely TEMPLATE-DRIVEN, which means that once Taco is up
and running, the HTML (or whatever) files themselves (called
Templates) contain the function calls, and those function calls
may get other Templates and parse them, and the whole business can get
quite complex.  

Here's an example of a very simple Template file:
__________________________________
Hello [[$user]], here is a list of people named Mortimer:<br>
<ul>
   [[ &list(driver=people first_name=Mortimer display_template=person_name) ]]
</ul>
Do you like the list?
__________________________________

The &list function happens to be a part of the Taco::DB package, not
included with this distribution.  As of 8/6/98, it's not yet ready for
release.  Please write me if you're interested in it.

Taco ships with a sample Taco module called Taco::Generic which implements
some generic functions useful in lots of templating situations.

In my opinion, Taco is most useful for large-ish projects, such as
maintaining a web-accessed database or running a fairly sophisticated
set of interactive pages.  If you just want a few small Perl functions
sprinkled in a web page, you might check out a different package.
Alternatives include HTML::EmbPerl.pm, Apache::ePerl.pm, and even
Apache's mod_perl server-side includes: <!--#perl sub="sub {print 2+2}" -->

My conscience makes me say that Taco may change significantly -
this is a very early version, after all =).

See the INSTALL file for directions on how to install Taco.


-Ken Williams
 ken@forum.swarthmore.edu