Editing Portal:SaaS and Web Development (section)

=== Historical importance ===

Perl’s historical importance to the web is enormous. It was one of the first widely used languages for dynamic websites. CGI.pm made web scripting practical. mod_perl made Perl web applications fast and deeply integrated with Apache. CGI::Application brought more structure to reusable CGI-style applications. Template systems separated HTML from code. FastCGI and related persistent-process models improved deployment. PSGI and Plack gave Perl a modern common web interface. PAGI points toward a possible async future.

Perl also played a major role in shared hosting. It powered countless CGI scripts, formed part of hosting culture, and remained important inside hosting infrastructure such as cPanel & WHM.

Perl did not remain the dominant language of public-facing web development. PHP took much of the mass shared-hosting market. Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Java, and other ecosystems took other parts of the web. But Perl’s influence is still visible in the basic idea that a scripting language can connect web requests, files, databases, templates, and system tools into a working application.