NAME
    CIPP - CgI Perl Preprocessor

SYNOPSIS
    This module is a preprocessor for the CIPP language. To use
    it you need either CGI::CIPP, Apache::CIPP or new.spirit.
    CGI::CIPP and Apache::CIPP are part of the CIPP distribution.

    Refer to README.Apache and README.CGI to learn, how CIPP
    ist used in this environments. You will never use the CIPP
    module directly.

    So this SYNOPSIS is empty... ;)

DESCRIPTION
    CIPP is a Perl module for translating CIPP sources to pure
    Perl programs. CIPP defines a HTML embedding language also
    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 does not 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 or CGI::CIPP modules.
    These let you execute CIPP sources transparently inside
    your webserver document tree. They define request handlers
    for CIPP sources, so they will be executed in an Apache or
    CGI environment on the fly. The Apache module needs mod_perl,
    implements a two-level preprocessing and Perl Compiler cache
    and provides great performance. The CGI module runs with
    any webserver and uses the standard CGI interface for
    communication.

    Development started spring 1997 at dimedis GmbH, Germany.
    It improved over the time while used in several projects.
    Since early 1999 this module is Open Source software and
    published on CPAN.

SIMPLE EXAMPLE
    Here is a (really) simple example of using CIPP in a HTML
    source to retrieve some information from a database. Think
    this as a HTML page which is "executed" on the fly by
    Apache::CIPP or CGI::CIPP. If you use new.spirit the source
    will be translated to a standalone CGI program.
    
    Note: there is no code to connect to the database. This is
    done implicitely. The configuration is taken from Apache,
    from a small CGI::CIPP wrapper program or from a global
    configuration file.
    
      # print table of users who match the given parameter
  
      <?INTERFACE INPUT="$search_name">

      <HTML>
      <HEAD><TITLE>tiny litte CIPP example</TITLE></HEAD>
      <BODY>
      <H1>Users matching '$search_name'</H1>
      <P>

      <TABLE BORDER=1>
      <TR><TD>Name</TD><TD>Adress</TD><TD>Phone</TD></TR>
      <?SQL SQL="select name, adress, phone
                 from   people
                 where  name like '%' || ? || '%'"
            PARAMS="$search_name"
            MY VAR="$n, $a, $p">
        <TR><TD>$n</TD><TD>$a</TD><TD>$p</TD></TR>
      <?/SQL>
      </TABLE>

      </BODY>
      </HTML>

PREREQUISITES
    CIPP itself needs perl 5.004_04 or better. To use its database
    interface you need 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.
    Also you can use it under Win32, it is widely tested with
    the ActiveState Perl distribution and also in production
    usage on this platform.

    There is special Apache webserver support through the module
    Apache::CIPP. You can use CIPP on any CGI capable webserver
    using either CGI::CIPP or new.spirit.

DOWNLOAD CIPP
    CIPP and friends can be downloaded from CPAN
    
        $CPAN/modules/by-authors/id/J/JR/JRED/

INSTALLING CIPP
    perl Makefile.PL
    make
    make test
    make install

DOCUMENTATION
    There is some technical information about the interface
    of CIPP embedded as POD in CIPP.pm. This section is in
    german language only. But usually you need not to care about
    the internal mechanisms of CIPP.

    The CIPP language reference manual can be downloaded from CPAN
    as a 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.

    The CIPP::Manual module is part of this distribution. It is
    a excerpt of the english PDF documention containing only the
    command reference chapter. You can read this manual using perldoc:

      perldoc CIPP::Manual

SUPPORTED LANGUAGES
    When CIPP development started early 1997 it was intended to be
    a tool for internal usage only. So the whole documentation was
    written in german.

    Since September 1999 CIPP has multilanguage support for its
    error messages. Also the documentation has been translated
    to english. The german documentation is not longer maintained.

BUG REPORTING
    Please send any bug reports or comments to
    
        cipp@dimedis.de

README REVISION
    $Id: README.CIPP,v 1.1.1.1 2001/03/17 15:44:25 joern Exp $

CREDITS
    Martin H. Sluka <martin@sluka.de> for his STICKY idea
    in some formular tags

AUTHOR
    Joern Reder <joern@dimedis.de>

COPYRIGHT
    Copyright (C) 1999 by Joern Reder and
                          dimedis GmbH, 50672 Koeln, Germany

    All Rights Reserved.

    This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
    modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.
