[Edinburgh-pm] CRUD frameworks

[Murray]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 10:48:59AM +0000, Miles Gould wrote:
> At the risk of being dangerously on-topic, what's the preferred way of
> writing simple web apps in Perl these days?

To appease the on-topic gods, surely the answer would be:

    http://nodejs.org

But for my money (and I have a bias towards crtical mass here)

    Catalyst
    DBIx::Class
    HTML::FormHandler
    HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC

The *::Manual pod pages for each dist are the best starting place.  And
the *::Manual::Cookbook pod pages are typically really worth a read.

I've also found that provided you've tried to rtfm, then the associated
irc.perl.org channels are both informative, friendly and very helpful.
Even vaugely noob friendly at times.

Subject to all the usual social "norms" of irc, and asking the question
according to the Book of Raymond, etc.

    #catalyst
    #dbix-class
    #formhandler

Me, I'd start here:

http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial::04_BasicCRUD
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial::09_AdvancedCRUD
http://search.cpan.org/perldoc?Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial::09_AdvancedCRUD::09_FormHandler

I will note that if all of these are new to you, then the grok'ing curve
was for me a bit harsh at first.  I personally found stepping through
the Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial in order helpful.  Although resisting the
urge to jump ahead/around was hard.  And if anyone can explain the
chained actions concept in ways that make sense (to me), I'll buy you a
beer.

HTML::FormHandler::Model::DBIC in particular is the sort of thing that
makes a sado like me go "squeeeee!" quite a lot when you see just how
little code you need to write to get a complex form (a) rendered, (b)
validated against some fairly decent list of Types and in/out of the
database.  I didn't find it obvious from the first glance, but after
playing with it, it is sparse gold dust.

There is also http://dev.catalystframework.org/wiki/crud none of which
I've used, but look like they'd be worth a poke.  There are a couple of
threads mentioned that claim to discuss the various options.

Final point: you'll want to track recent releases of all of these.
Relying, for instance, on the shipping Debian/Ubuntu releases soon
frustrates.