DCPM: meeting

[Simon Waters]

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Matthew Browning wrote:
>
> ...here's a question then that is sort of on-topic because Simon has
>  been expressing an interest in CGI:  where's the silver-bullet
> framework for Perl-CGI?  I've been banging on at this for years now
> and I don't think it's possible to get any more `professional' than
> my current toolbox:

;)

> mod_perl (unless it's a cheapo hosting deal)

Damn, I'm helping build a cheapo hosting deal ;)

It is more a case of building a managable, and thus cost effective,
hosting offering.

We'll no doubt add features as users request them, and we can work out
how to do it without letting people hog or abuse the server.

Mod_perl documentation has a long discussion on ISP mod_perl offerings -
I came away with the impression that user space Linux is probably the
best way of offering it securely, so if and when we are offering that
we'll be doing it on a.n.other set of servers - sorry.

> Handler inheriting from CGI::Application CGI::Session or
> Apache::Session (can't decide) TT2 for *total* separation of style
> and content

TT2? ah the templates you mentioned.... http://www.template-toolkit.org/

> What do you get told to use if you are just starting out?

Ah one I can answer... I surfed a little... basically the various
HOW-TO's all seem to say much the same thing about CGI's. PHP is great
for small projects, but when it gets big people prefer PERL (presumably
because they can better hide/abstract/reuse, and effectively build a
toolkit for that project).

CGI::Application and Mason get a mention, but no one seems THAT
enthusiastic about them, although that may be because the more
"infrastructure" you throw into the pot, the more people who are
excluded from using it, the amount you need to know and understand to
stand on the top of the pile, and discover it is only 10 lines and a
stye sheet to buid the perfect website.... I know the Netscape authoring
stuff ended up this way, if you chucked enough Netscape software in the
pot, you could build excellent webpages in a few lines of XML, but you
need a budget of 200,000 to buy the hardware, software and system admin
to put it all together, and of course someone who can write the CORRECT
7 lines of XML.

So yes at the moment I'm hand coding large chunks, reusing what has gone
before me, in not as strucured a way as I would like.

There were some crazy 4GL languages around a few years back. One
was called Magic, and it was used by a winning team in a couple of
programming "races". But the ideas behind it and powerbuilder haunt me
whenever I revisit the typical "form" like programming world that is
most of business programming. Basically the boring 80% is search, read,
modify and store data, so a lot of what you code in such apps is routine
framework  and much of it can be implied from the database structure.

If you have an order table, and an order item table (master-detail),
you'll almost invariably want "order query", "add item", "modify order",
"modify item", "delete order". So why no just build them automatically,
with perhaps options to hint at what should and shouldn't be included.
Plus use the database relationships to throw in some navigation....

Powerbuilder had an add-on for this kind of stuff (I forget the name),
but it must be pretty old by now. This allowed you to define database
(and program layout) structure graphically, and generate "framework
code" (and DDL - data definition language - all those create table,
create index etc).

The bit that demo'ed well, not sure how well it worked in practice, was
you could alter the database structure with a little SQL, click the
reverse engineer button, and it would redo the graphical database
design, and take your modifcations into account, allowing you to extend
the design taking into account the bits of the 'real world' as they
encroached.

Whilst I can conceive of what I want, not sure I know how to write it yet.

 Simon
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