Alternatives to CGI.pm

CGI.pm clearly states at the top of its documentation that "CGI.pm is no longer considered good practice for developing web applications, including quick prototyping and small web scripts."

A documentation-only module has been released called CGI::Alternatives which lists a few alternatives to using CGI.pm. However, it mainly suggests heavyweight frameworks like Template Toolkit, Mojolicious, Dancer2, Catalyst, etc. That's usually not I would ever use CGI.pm for.

I usually want to just do some basic HTML-escaping or URL-escaping, or once in a while, parsing of the QUERY_STRING, the POST body, or cookies.

Lightweight replacements for CGI.pm

• CGI::Lite (last updated May 2021)
  • it directly provides the routines browser_escape(), url_encode(), url_decode(), parse_cookies(), and parse_form_data()
• CGI::Simple (8 ++s, last updated Jan 2022)
  • CGI::Simple::Util — exactly what I was looking for!
• CGI::Tiny (7 ++s, last updated Jun 2021)
  • I find its reliance on the sub cgi (&) { ... } to be kind of weird and awkward:
    • "There is no CGI::Tiny object constructor; the object is accessible within the cgi block"
  • it also REALLY wants to output something by the end, so if you want to use it just for a utility function, you're screwed unless you poke around at its inards

Things that just do URL escaping:

• URI::Escape
  • although it isn't in the Perl core, it has 2,000 reverse dependencies (!!!), so you probably already have it on your machine
• URL::Encode

Things that just do HTML escaping:

• HTML::Entities
  • it has 588 reverse dependencies
• HTML::Escape — escape only, no unescape

Things that just parse application/x-www-form-urlencoded and multipart/form-data:

• HTTP::Body

Things that just parse cookies:

• CGI::Cookie::XS
• Cookie::Baker