Running Perl from CDROM or USB using Stunnix Advanced Web Server

Stunnix Advanced Web Server allows the running of Perl-based sites off cdrom, DVD or USB on Windows, MacOS X (v10.2 and above, PPC and Intel) and Linux. Perl sites will run the same way off CD or DVD on any of these platforms. No installation of Perl onto the user's computer is needed - the perl interpreter and all modules run directly off CDROM or USB.

Perl ships with SAWS for all supported OSes except MacOSX (it's in the standard install of MacOX operating system), and that already has MySQL and SQLite DBI extensions included. This means one can access MySQL and SQLite databases running off CDROM from Perl scripts. A SAWS demo CD contains sample Perl scripts that access MySQL and SQLite running off CD. Since Perl is used for some tasks by SAWS, it's impossible to have CD/DVD without Perl support.

Perl scripts running off CD are executed using mod_perl framework - either as mod_perl handlers, or in CGI emulation mode of mod_perl. The availability of mod_perl makes Perl-based sites work extremely fast. Any mod_perl-based site should work just fine off CDROM under SAWS. Beside others, HTML::Mason was tested and was found to be working off CDROM under SAWS.

Perl standalone executable is also available to each script running off CDROM - the location of the Perl interpreter is provided in the STUNNIXWS_PERL_INTERP environment variable. For a Windows platform, both Win32 and the console versions of perl are available for the programmer.

We will be glad to add support for Perl module if it's currently not available in Perl that ships with SAWS. Just contact us and we'll discuss details.

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