How's that for a boring title? I picked one as ambiguous as that largely because all of the good ones for this kind of thing have already been taken. I could, for example, call what I am creating here a template for the display of the pages in the application, but in this context the term template is used to describe constructs in which pre-defined chunks of code are inserted into generated html either to extend to functionality available in the page or to perpetuate stylistic conventions. Similarly, I could call this a framework, but that term is generally used to describe application framework packages that provide resources that can be used to create multipple sites that share elements to one end or another. I may well implement each of these as time goes on, but that is not what I am doing right now.

Strictly speaking, however, it is appropriate to refer to the process I am about to start as building a framework, because I will be constructing the structure on which the various execution elements of the application will be hung. A simple framework at this point, but a framework nonetheless. (As I move on with this and later discussions you will probably start to recognize common elements in some of the sites you visit. There are a number of frameworks out there, implemented in perl and in other languages. A relative few dominate the installed base for specific types of servers, like chat and blog hosts. If at any point you were to want to implement one of those, having a better sense of how things work behind the scenes seriously eases the task of customizing the framework. You don't want your site to look like all the others, do you? People would snicker behind your back, saying "They never changed the defaults."<grin>)

Back to business. In the next page I will work through the mechanics of using stacked handlers to create a basic framework under mod_perl, and then I will implement the entry system within that structure.