CIPP - CgI Perl Preprocessor by Joern Reder Copyright (c) 1997-1999 dimedis GmbH, Germany This library ist free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself. $Id: README,v 1.5 1999/01/28 17:38:53 joern Exp $ WHAT IS CIPP? CIPP is a perl module for translating CIPP sources to pure perl programs. CIPP defines a HTML embedding language 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 has no 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_Handler module. This module defines an Apache request handler for CIPP sources, so they will be executed in an Apache environment on the fly, with a two-level cache and great performance. The Apache::CIPP_Handler module is free software. WHAT DO YOU NEED TO USE CIPP CIPP itself needs perl 5.004_01 or better. To use its database interface you must have installed 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. The Win32 platforms are not tested yet very well but most functions should run ok. DOWNLOAD CIPP CIPP (and also spirit mentioned above) can be downloaded from CPAN $CPAN/authors/id/J/JR/JRED or (in future) from the spirit website. http://spirit.dimedis.de/ (this site will start March 1999) INSTALLING CIPP perl Makefile.PL make make install DOCUMENTATION Technical information about the usage of the CIPP.pm module is embedded as POD in CIPP.pm and can be retrieved with "perldoc CIPP". You will not need this information, if you use CIPP either with Apache::CIPP_Handler or spirit. The CIPP language reference manual can be downloaded from CPAN as an 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. SUPPORTED LANGUAGES When the development of CIPP started (spring 1997), there was no idea to publish it, as it was designed for spirit, and spirit was intended for internal use only. So the documentation and all CIPP messages are in german language. As soon as possible we want to provide an english version, too. SIMPLE EXAMPLE Here is a simple example of using CIPP in an HTML source to retrieve some information from a database. Think this as a HTML page which will be executed on the fly in an Apache environment or will be converted to a standalone CGI script. Note: there is no code to connect to the database. This is done implicitely. The configuration is taken from Apache or from an external configuration file, if you use the CGI standalone version of CIPP. tiny litte CIPP example

tiny litte CIPP example

NameAdressPhone
$n$a$p
BUG REPORTING Please send any bug reports or comments to cipp-bug@dimedis.de or use the bug report formular on the spirit website http://spirit.dimedis.de/ (this site will start March 1999) You can speak german with us, but we understand english, too ;)