<p>I have a very basic question. I have created a local (mysql) database in my system. I would like to know what would be the best option for a front end. I had used html before and want to try out something new. I might also add some perl code in between for some computational work. Kindly help me in this regard..</p>

Already Nice Answers: Here's my two cents. 

I would recommend you to start with a basic template and add various components as required. 

You can do the front-end -> database interaction in a simple way using [CGI.pm][1] with [DBI::mysql / DBD::mysql][2]

But the current state-of-art is to use [MVC][3] based frameworks (Catalyst is Perl based and Django is Python based MVC frameworks) for front-end with database interaction. A detailed list of Perl based frameworks are available [here][4]. Remember all of them are not capable of full MVC. For example [Template::Toolkit][5] will only take care of the view part. The latest in the block is [Mojolicious][6]. I am currently experimenting with this, got good reviews from fellow Perl fans. So if you want to try something different within Perl, you could give it a try.

To get the best look and user interaction for the interface you may need a bit of [CSS][7], [Java Script][8] and [Ajax][9]. If you are new to this, I would recommend you take a look at [W3C tutorials][10] and finally if you have enough time, you could learn a great deal of all these technologies from the online course videos : [Building Dynamic, Scalable websites][11] by [David J Malan][12].

 [1]: http://search.cpan.org/dist/CGI.pm/lib/CGI.pm
 [2]: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/dbi.html
 [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model%E2%80%93view%E2%80%93controller
 [4]: http://perl.apache.org/products/app-server.html
 [5]: http://template-toolkit.org/
 [6]: http://mojolicious.org/
 [7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_Style_Sheets
 [8]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
 [9]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ajax_%28programming%29
 [10]: http://www.w3schools.com/
 [11]: http://academicearth.org/lectures/building-dynamic-websites-http
 [12]: http://www.cs.harvard.edu/malan/