Re: Perl/CGI Development on Win32 in 2004

deep,

I am developing Perl/CGI on Win32 and publishing to a remote unix server. I use cvs (version control) with Eclipse (IDE) and EPIC (Eclipse plugin for Perl). Locally, I use Apache for my web server. This is all open source and all excellent stuff.

Before Eclipse, I was making changes locally using gVim (IDE) and then using SSH to upload the modified files. Very time consuming. After trying out cvs, and in particular, Eclipse, I don't know how I got by without it.

Basically I set up a cvs repository on the remote server. cvs and Eclipse both support SSH. My local web source directoy (on my laptop) is a cvs workspace that was created by checking out a copy from the repository. Once I've made my changes locally and am satisfied with the changes, I commit those changes to the remote cvs repository. My remote production web source, is also a cvs workspace that was created by checking it out from the repository. Now it only takes a single cvs update command to update this remote workspace from the repository. One command brings the entire remote web source up to date. Its a lot faster and less error prone then doing it manually.

It takes a little while to get everything set up initially but after that is is extremely easy to use and makes development much more efficient. I can also roll-back to previous versions if I decide that I don't like the latest changes I've made

To add icing to the cake, Eclipse has numerous other powerful plugins. I think that the things you find lacking in Open Perl IDE, you'll find are supported by Eclipse. I tried Open Perl IDE and it didn't have what I was looking for. As well, I was concerned that it didn't seem to have anyone currently working on improving it.

I use SQLite for my database locally, which is also supported on the remote host. I haven't had any problems with it. It even has some free management tools for Win32, such as SQLite Database Browser.

Not what you were asking but, FWIW, Perl modules/tools that I find essential are Template Toolkit, CGI, CGI::Application, CGI::Session, DBI, Class::DBI, and Data::FormValidator.

HTH,

Anne

Comment on Re: Perl/CGI Development on Win32 in 2004

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Re^2: Perl/CGI Development on Win32 in 2004 by Joost (Canon) on Aug 17, 2004 at 19:26 UTC
I second Anneq's suggestion to use CVS (I've heard good things about subversion too, but I have no personal experience with it). Personally I can't seem to get used to EPIC, but Eclipse does have some really funky CVS integration. If you want something a little "lighter", try TortoiseCVS - it integrates into the win32 explorer, so it's easy to use and works well. The CVS client/server model can help with deployment and it will make it a lot easier to have more than one developer working on a project, with each programmer having their own development sandbox. This means everyone can run his/her own server to test on and changes only get committed to the repository after they get tested on the developer's box. I'd strongly recommend you set up a webserver for each developer on their own machine. You want to keep the write/run/debug cycle short, and time spend moving files about is time waisted. (Another possibility is to put the sandboxes on a shared directory on another machine, but remember that people will want to reconfigure the webserver and/or reboot the machine) "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply]
Re^3: Perl/CGI Development on Win32 in 2004 by Anneq (Vicar) on Aug 17, 2004 at 22:01 UTC
Joost, Have you tried the latest version of EPIC (0.3.0)? There are some improvements that might help eliminate some of your problems with it. I've managed, through googling, to get Run working and the code templating and code completion features work excellently. You can bookmark lines of code and insert to do items right in your script. The latest version now includes some documentation that helps in figuring things out. Errors and warnings show up in the Problems tab and you can hover over errors/warnings to see an explanation. As well, you can highlight a word (for example a function) and it shows the perldoc page on it. A handy bar on the right of the code window show colored bars so that you can quickly scroll to errors (red), to do tags (blue), and bookmarks (green). OK, so I'm a big fan of EPIC and Eclipse. But for a lot of good reasons. UPDATE I saw an Eclipse plugin for subversion but I haven't looked into it yet. Anne	[reply]


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