Yeah, you’d have to install yet another runtime on all of your nodes to support server-side JavaScript.

I’ve been playing around with this new language called Python. The indenting syntax takes a little getting used to, but the code is way more readable than Perl. Just be sure to set indent-tabs-mode: nil if you use Emacs.

Perl is the only way to go for serious CGI scripts. It’s so powerful, Python is limited and clunky by comparison. And a new language with syntactically important whitespace? Seriously? It will never displace Perl!

Eh, maybe. well, nice talking. I'm going to go back to writing CFML. My boss bought a bunch of licenses with our last funding round, so I have to use it. I don't think it's going to make it any easier to write our reverse auction site for pet food discount coupons (don't tell anybody - we're still in stealth,) but whatever.

Python will never work on the web since different platforms use different characters to indicate line break.

Not true. For your Unix hosts, you just need to write a perl script to strip carriage returns before running a script written on Windows, and substitute LF for CR for scripts written on a Mac and for your Windows hosts write a Visual Basic program to add CRs to Unix scripts and add LFs after CRs for Mac scripts.

If you figure out how to write an AppleScript program to munge the Unix and Windows scripts, let me know. Manually fixing them in BBedit is getting to be a real drag.

I know a guy Rasmus, working on this server side bit called Personal Home Page. Maybe worth checking out.