As a refugee from the web programming wars I fell rather confused as I read through various comments here and info on the Web about contructing large Web based apps in Perl.
I have been doing this for a while, and have a couple of pretty large (20K+ lines of Perl in about 40 scripts) apps running quite happily. But they are maintenance nightmares. They feature
- relatively little use of CGI,pm - usually only for parsing form values = we started out using cgi-lib.pl when we stopped using out hand-rolled parser.
- All the HTML is in <<here statements, this stuff was started in 1994. We did use a template parser of our own for a while, but it was too clunky so we gave it away.
- Session management is done by using a variable passed in the URL.
- About five years ago we updated from flat-file dtabases to MySQL with DBI&DBD
My more current work uses:
- CGI.pm extensively
- Template::Html for all display.
- CGI::Session for sessions management.
- Abstract::SQL for building complex SQL on the fly
- and of course the inevitable DBI&DBD combinations.
My question is this. I am about to embark on a total re-write of one of the 20K+ nightmares and a totally new app that is strting to feel like it will be five to six times the size.
I would like to make some intelligent choices about new ways to do all of this! I see lots of Application Frameworks getting around, but I would like some informed opinion about these.
- What are monks using as frameworks for large web-apps?
- What are your favourite CPAN modules other than the usual suspects such as those I have mentioned? Why?
- Do you have any pointers to suitable books (other than O'Reilly I have everything they have published related to Perl and the Web.
Please be as eloquent and verbose as you desire! I love reading long and etailed posts as much as I love the short pithy ones.
jdtoronto
-
Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
-
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big>
<blockquote> <br /> <dd>
<dl> <dt> <em> <font>
<h1> <h2> <h3> <h4>
<h5> <h6> <hr /> <i>
<li> <nbsp> <ol> <p>
<small> <strike> <strong>
<sub> <sup> <table>
<td> <th> <tr> <tt>
<u> <ul>
-
Snippets of code should be wrapped in
<code> tags not
<pre> tags. In fact, <pre>
tags should generally be avoided. If they must
be used, extreme care should be
taken to ensure that their contents do not
have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent
horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor
intervention).
-
Want more info? How to link
or How to display code and escape characters
are good places to start.
|