PHP vs. Perl

We've now reached one of the more challenging steps in our project. CiviCRM is written in PHP and WebGUI is written in Perl. Yet we have to integrate the two.

Our three options are:

1. Use WebGUI's built-in HTTP proxy asset to display CiviCRM's public pages (like contribution forms, event registration forms, etc.) inside WebGUI templates.
1. The downside here is that this often messes up forms, which are pretty critical to basically everything we'll be displaying from CiviCRM.
   
2. Use WebGUI's built-in web services client asset to get enough data from CiviCRM's SOAP interface to build the public pages inside WebGUI templates.
1. Frankly, I'll be surprised if this works. But who knows...
   
3. Write a new WebGUI asset that calls the CiviCRM web services (in REST fashion, of course) and gets the data it needs to build and display the public pages inside WebGUI templates.

Obviously we'd love for #1 to work. If it doesn't we'll drop down to trying #2. If that doesn't work, we'll sigh and get to work on #3. #3 will take a little longer, and probably push something else off the list of things we can get done this summer.

We'll see which one ends up working. :)