Playing Hangman with mod_perl

Feel free to grab the source code, you'll find the hangman games in the perl/ch5 directory.

This version of the game keeps a running score of everyone who's used it, and should be the one to use if you're just looking to play.

Hidden Fields

This version of the game maintains its state in hidden fields. Performance is great and the script is very simple, but it's ridiculously easy to cheat.

Cookies

This version maintains state with a cookie. Performance is still good and it's a little harder to cheat, but still possible.

Untamperable Cookies

This version adds a message authentication check to the cookie so that the user can't change its value (to artificially inflate his score, for example). The user can still peak at the secret word, however.

Encrypted Cookies

This version encrypts the cookie so that it can't be read or tampered with. Very secure, but performance suffers noticeably (at least on this underpowered 90 MHz Pentium... donations to modperl.com gladly accepted).

Persistent Memory

This version keeps the state information in a persistent memory structure maintained by IPC::Shareable. The session ID is kept in a cookie. To keep memory usage under control, only 100 simultaneous sessions are allowed, with the oldest sessions deleted as needed.

Database Sessions, URL Rewriting

This version stores the state information in a mySQL database, linked to a session ID. The session ID is appended to the URL (yuck).

Database Sessions, Cookies

This version stores the state information in a mySQL database and stashes the session ID in a cookie. It also maintains a neat "top winners" list of everyone who's played.