Expert Advice Needed for Web Interface

I am currently working on a project to build an Oracle database and a Web
interface for searching the database. We're not sure where we're going to put
the interface (i.e. what server), so I need to make the application as generic
and portable as possible, and I'm trying make it so it's not going to require
the sysadmin to make any changes to the server on which it will reside (e.g.
installation of new software, etc). The database will reside on a Unix database
server, and the Web interface will reside on a different Unix server.

Here's my question:
What tools/methods would YOU use to build a Web interface to an Oracle database?

Currently, I'm leaning towards HTML forms (with maybe Javascript preprocessing)
that invoke a CGI programs that access the database and return HTML pages with
the search results.

I am an experienced C and C++ programmer (with a little Java experience), but I've
never used Perl. I've heard that Perl is definitely the language of choice for
CGI. Would it be worth it to learn Perl? Is there a special version of Perl that
I need to use? In a CGI book, it mentioned OraPerl, but I haven't been able to
find any documentation for it.

Any suggestions or comments would be greatly appreciated.

-John Tutton Received on Fri Oct 16 1998 - 00:00:00 CDT