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Perl CGI Search Engine in Help

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by libby.gage

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Hi All, I'm a Tech Writer and am using AIT as our doc authoring tool. We are developing a platform independent web application for Document Control and need a full text search engine for the help. The problem is that AIT only offers this in Perl/CGI scripts. They do have it bundles only in the HTML Help output. We will have to use HTML/XHTML. We cannot be sure that our customers web app servers will be able to support Perl/CGI. Is there some way to bundle Perl into our app? Or would we run into version pbs this way? Any ideas out there? Should we require that our customers use a certain kind of web app server? Thanks in advance for your help!

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by jay eckles

Well, you're going to have to use some sort of programming tool to provide meaningful search capabilities. There are a couple of routes you can go:
1. Perl - it's available on Unix and Windows. I've never seen a web server on Unix that didn't have Perl installed also. As for Windows, it might require a download and setup on behalf of the admin, but it's not that much work.
2. Java - While the JVM is probably going to be on pretty much any machine these days, if you want to do servlets or JSPs, that requires some serious set-up of a servlet container like Tomcat. People won't go to that trouble just for your app.
3. ASP - Pretty much ties you to the Windows platform, which you probably don't want. It's possible to run ASP on Unix, but's not pretty.
4. PHP - Again, requires set up on both Unix and Windows. Fewer people have PHP already set up, but it's not difficult to do.
5. All of the above - You could always provide your functionality in multiple formats, and they let the user edit a configuration file to choose the architecture they want to employ. That will reach the largest number of platforms, but will be a maintenance nightmare.

Good luck.

Jay

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