Perl and CGI

Still going strong Perl has dominated server-side development for years. While other environments - ASP, JSP, ColdFusion, and maybe Zope - are digging into its market share, Perl still remains critical to an enormous number of Web sites.
Scalable and powerful While Perl's earliest CGI implementation had enormous overhead issues, more recent developments (notably Perl 5, mod_perl, and ISAPI) have made Perl much more of a contender on performance grounds.
A different approach Unlike the DOM-based models presented earlier, most Perl development uses XML::Parser, which presents information as a series of events rather than a document tree. Built on top of James Clark's highly efficient Expat parser, this gives Perl capabilities that none of the other scripting languages have for creating small and efficient utilities.