Perl and ASP integration 1

[Johnnie100]

Hello,

I am about to start my masters project which will retreive and process information from library web pages and present it to the user according to date. I would ideally like to build my project using Perl to search the returned html information - as I am told it is a good skill to have and not too difficult to learn. The problem is I would like to integrate the Perl text analysis into an ASP project is this possible?

The reason why I want to do this is because the second part of the project is to store user information, ie areas of interest etc and then periodically search the 'new books' pages in the library and e-mail the user if anything of interest has come into the library.

Would Perl and ASP be the best solution to this bearing in mind I have no experience of Perl or unix, but some experience of ASP.

Thankyou very much for any help

Andy

 

[luciddream]

well, you could probably do it all in asp or do it all in perl. but, if you want to learn perl, it is indeed a powerful language. plus, you can use perl in asp, which is kinda neat. perl isn't all that difficult to learn, especially if you know other languages as well. luciddream@subdimension.com

 

[Johnnie100]

Thanks for that.

I am a programmer, my training is in assembler - old school mainframe, and I'm currently retraining in VB with a very small amount of ASP experience(on which I would like to build) - so coming from a mainframe background my knowledge of all things distributed is low, but I'm working on it!

To get an overview of how this would be achieved am I correct in thinking that;

1. HTML page would use a CGI script to retreive info from library web page and return this to the ASP project. Is it the CGI script that is written in PERL or is the CGI script a basic protocol that is sent from and returns information to the PERL module?

2. A PERL routine/module held in the ASP project would then seperate out the relevant information into arrays and search these on the selected keywords.

3. How then is the information sorted into relevance and matches on the keyword search? And how then is it formatted into a presentable format? Do we format it using ASP server side scripting(with which I'm familiar) or is it generally done with the PERL?

Thanks for any help

Andy

 

[tsdragon]

You could use the LWP::UserAgent module (available at

http://www.cpan.org)

to fetch the library web pages directly into your perl program and process them there. This would combine steps 1 and 2. It could be run as a cgi script, or run directly from the command line.

To do the searching and ranking you could also use a perl cgi script. The script would search your database, rank the results, and output them as an html page.

I don't see any need for asp at all.
Tracy Dryden
tracy@bydisn.com

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[kempis555]

One thing to keep in mind is that ASP and VBscript are not one and the same.
I work at an all-Microsoft shop, so I use PerlScript to write my ASP applications.

The ASP system itself doesn't do much, it mostly handles printing to the browser, interfacing with Windows objects (like databases and such), and keeping session variables.
It's the perl which does all the logic. For your situation perlscript would be great, for I don't think a VBScript would be able to reach out and pull in a page like perl can.

To make a IIS box run perlscript ASP's go to

http://www.activestate.com

and download/run the perl .MSI file they have there. It's free.


I've used VBScript on a big project in the past, and after becoming proficient in it, I really really didn't like it.