I am trying to write a Perl script that will take a user parameter from command line and with his parameter, Perl script will call a JavaScript function in a HTML page. How can I go ahead to with this?
3 Answers
Not that I've seen. Perl is strictly server side, and JS functions you're talking about are on the client.
The closest you would get is have the Perl script write a block into the HTML page so that the page fires it on load to perform the action. But that's a little shaky at best to do.
Comments
It depends on whether the browser or server will be taking the first step.
If the server needs to run code first and then execute some JS, then @skyburner's solution would work. Essentially you would already have some functions defined on the page, but then you would dynamically add a block of JS to call whichever function you need to.
However, if the Perl is being run due to a user's action on the current page (such as clicking something or submitting a form), then AJAX would be the way to go. You would use JS to submit an HTTP request to the Perl script. The Perl would then return some value back to the JavaScript and execute some function based on this result. This would all happen "behind-the-scenes" without the user leaving the page.
Comments
If I understand correctly about what you want, since not all the browsers support socket, this is what you can do:
- Have an ajax service call periodically sending requests to the server for update
- Once the the parameters from the command line are taken, you can send the result along with an ajax response back to the page, and call the function in the ajax request callback function.
Also, another option, you can use reverse ajax to accomplish this. See Wikipedia about reverse ajax (comet), especially Ajax with long polling.
