Hey guys

For those who were at my Catalyst talk you will know that one of the reasons I really like Catalyst is that it encourages you to do the right thing and separate your data from your web application and from your presentation.

For this reason, I write APIs (Perl Modules) that have nothing to do with even the internet or the web or HTML to manage data.

So I am on my next quest. I have been working with MyPhotoGallery from Fuzzy Monkey - http://www.fuzzymonkey.org/cgi-bin/newfuzzy/software.cgi

It does everything I need - basically - it allows you to create an arbitrary directory of images - and the interface shows you the directories, thumb nails, pagenated, watermarked - all the usual graphics stuff without the crap - just the viewer - and just on images in directories - no reinventing the wheel, no mysql Database etc.

Anyway it got me thinking about using this code - it is completely all of the wrong things - it is bad procedural code, it has lots of non-use-strict (I know some people like 'use strict is gay'), it has all the HTML mixed up in the code - and the list goes on.

I have started using the concepts to write a Catalyst modules - I am hoping to do it in such a way that the component can be used outright or modular as part of another system - thus encourage reuse.

But I digress - back to the original part of the topic - what API. So back to my other gripe about APIs which is high level APIs - when we are in Windows we can access a User or a Capture Device - these are a single API - people can add a video camera or a scanner or a slide scanner or ... - and I can write a simple script to get a picture that is effectively future proof.

Another few steps back... I want a Gallery API in Perl - preferrably one we can extend to have multiple backends - so those that think it is necessary to use MySQL to store original data for an album - can do so, while I stick to my directory and file system.

Anyone know anything close? I want to keep it tiny - any special requests that people would need?

Scott
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Scott Penrose
Digital Dimensions
scott@dd.com.au
http://www.dd.com.au/