Embperl::Intro is an introduction to Embperl.

Embperl has started as a Perl module for simply embedding Perl into HTML and has grown to a full featured system to build dynamic content (not only) under mod_perl. The version 1.x focus on HTML documents, also it could be used for any sort of ascii files, and brings a lot of features especialy usefull in a web-environment. This features includes handling of form data and dynamic HTML tables/lists, session management and context sensitv escaping and unescaping. More over you can break up your documents in small reusable components/objects and build a object-oriented website out of such objects, by using inheritence and specificly overriding parts of the page. Also Embperl can cope with pages that are screw up by high-level HTML editors, so your designer can still use there favorite tool.

Embperl 2.0, which is a complete rewrite of the Embperl core, is not even much faster then 1.x, but adds new possibilities. You can extent or define your own syntax, thus giving the chance to trigger actions on certain tags or inventing your own tags (creating a taglib). It is much more modularized, so specific steps could be replaced by custom processor and more then one processor can act on a document before it goes to the browser (just like a Unix pipe). To enhances performance 2.0 indrocuces caching of the output or intermediate steps.

Due to this modularization, it is now possible, to replace Embperl parser by an XML parser and to do XML processing, for example by pluging in an XSLT processer in the processing pipeline. Embperl 2.0 can utilize libxml2 and libxslt for XML and XSLT processing.

All versions of Embperl can be used offline (as a normal CGI script or as a module from other Perl code), but its real power comes when running under mod_perl and Apache. Its directly integrated with Apache and mod_perl to achieve the best performance by directly using Apache functions and precompiling your code to avoid a recompile on every request.