If you are comfortable using cookies and the strategy outlined above, you can safely skip the rest of this chapter and move on to the issue of managing the forms your channel users submit—see Managing Channel Form Submissions. If you really want the nitty-gritty details of how to implement a personalized channel, read on.
But before we do, a couple of quick disclaimers. First, the Legal Notice of Liability:
The information in this document is distributed on an As Is basis, without warranty. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of the tutorial, neither the author nor AvantGo shall have any liability to any person or entity with respect to loss or damage caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by the instructions contained herein.
The code examples you are about to see should be used as general guidelines only. While the channel works, it probably is not as efficient or as bulletproof as something you could write yourself. So feel free to look at what I have done here and follow the same processes for your channel, but do not reuse my code. I am sure you can do better starting from scratch.
All code was created with Perl 5.005 with the CGI and CGI::Cookie modules (although I do not really use them to their full extent). I also made use of Perl's DBM capabilities, which gives
me access to a very simple database. I am running these scripts on an Apache server under Windows 2000, although I am not
using mod_perl, or any higher level tools like Mason, PHP, or ASP.
Perl can sometimes be a confusing language for those not familiar with it, but I tried to avoid some of the crazier idiomatic tricks. Hopefully, if you have some programming experience, you will be able to follow along.
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