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.
	
	<HTML>
	<HEAD><TITLE>tiny litte CIPP example</TITLE></HEAD>
	<BODY>
	<H1>tiny litte CIPP example</H1>
	<P>
	
	<TABLE BORDER=1>
	<TR><TD>Name</TD><TD>Adress</TD><TD>Phone</TD></TR>
	
	<?SQL SQL="select name, adress, phone from people"
	      MY VAR="$n, $a, $p">
	  <TR><TD>$n</TD><TD>$a</TD><TD>$p</TD></TR>
	<?/SQL>
	</TABLE>
	
	</BODY>
	</HTML>

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 ;)
