cooperation between existing Perl cgi programs and Minivend possible?

[Philip Tsai <tsailipu@yahoo.com>]

Hello all,

I am a new user of minivend and just start to learn
the intricacy of MV. To start, I have read through the MV documentation
and searched through the mail archive
for a topic that I think, to many users coming from the popular Perl
cgi scripting community, should probably be an FAQ.  However, I can't
quite find discussions or
documentation about this:

  Is it possible for existing Perl cgi scripts to
cooperate/interact with Minivend ?  For instance, say if I already have
a Perl script that implements stage-by-stage form-filling, -verifying
and -confirmation tasks (a popular, basic task for a cgi script, I
hope), will it be able to update/modify/share
a product/order/user DB with MV ?

By reading MV doc., I know one can always re-implement such
form-filling/verifying task using MV
templates and tags.  However, there are some merits to a standalone,
working Perl cgi scripts (for one thing,
form-filling/verifying/confirmation can be implemented in one cgi
script, whereas if one is to do such stage-by-stage task, one has to
write separate MV pages (if my understanding of MV is correct so far)).
 That's why I wonder whether in general it's possible for external Perl
scripts to cooperate with MV at least w.r.t. the use of common DB
files.  One possible issue that arises is the possible DB file-locking
between Perl and MV, i.e. can a Perl script simply lock a MV DB file
(say, *.asc/gdbm) while reading/updating that file without running into
a race condition with MV ?

To a new user coming from Perl cgi-scripts, the above seems to be a
natural question to ask, and if so, perhaps we can make it an FAQ ? :)

Thanks for sharing your experiences!
Philip
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