About the 

Technical Reviewers 

J

ESSE

 E

RLBAUM

 has been developing software professionally since 1994. He has 

developed custom software for a variety of clients including Time, Inc., the WPP 

Group, the Asia Society, and the United Nations. While in elementary school, Jesse 

was introduced to computer programming. It became his passion instantly, and by 

the time he was in middle school, he wrote and presented a  learning  program to 

his class to satisfy a science assignment. In 1989, he started his own bulletin board 

system (BBS),  The Belfry(!),  which quickly attracted a cult of regulars who enjoyed its 

vibrant and creative environment.

Jesse's enthusiasm for the World Wide Web was the natural result of the 

intersection of his two principal interests at the time, online communities and 

programming. Over the next few years, as the state of the art grew to embrace 

more interactive capabilities, he focused his efforts on building the systems and 

standards from which his clients increasingly benefited. In 1997, he established a 

library of reusable, object oriented Perl libraries called  Dynexus,  which was the 

foundation upon which he developed Web based, database connected systems.

It was during this period that Jesse met Sam Tregar. For two years Sam and 

Jesse worked together on a variety of custom software systems. In 1999, Jesse 

encouraged Sam to release HTML::Template (originally Dynexus::HTML::Template) 

to CPAN. In July 2000 Sam returned the favor, encouraging Jesse to release 

CGI::Application (originally Dynexus::OOCGI::Standard). CGI::Application is a 

framework for building Web based applications. This framework has been adopted 

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