[plug] seeking perl wisdom

[Trevor Phillips]

On Tuesday 05 November 2002 12:42, sol wrote:
> 
> My (hypothetical) question is:
>
> If you were going to develop a web site from scratch - knowing what you
> know now - that would require a high degree of dynamic content, and were
> going to process online transactions (including credit card and cheque
> order) using a RDB like Postgresql, what method of development would you
> favour?

I'd write it in mod_perl as custom modules, or more likely, the bulk of it in 
EDO, with extraneous non-standard handling as custom modules.

EDO (Extensible Data Objects) is a markup language I wrote myself years ago, 
and have been steadily developing over the years, designed to throw DB access 
into pages, but it's quite powerful and, well, extensible.

It's also quite inefficient/slow (usually got around using extensive caching), 
very powerful at some stuff, but clumsy at others, and still heavily under 
development.

It's a wheel I started to work on myself before other similar free solutions 
were worked on, and so I haven't looked closely at many other systems...

If you want more info, I've slapped it onto SourceForge, and would welcome 
feedback (or even co-developers):
   http://edo.sourceforge.net/

It's only CVS ATM, and I think I'm missing some extra libraries developed 
in-house for some of the modules... Also, this is "version 2", which is 
structured much better than the old version, but I haven't adapted the 
mod_perl module to work - Still in testing using the FastCGI executable 
version. ^_^

Most of the "Demo EDO Apps" are used on our servers under restricted access, 
although we're about to replace large chunks of the top-level pages with 
dynamic EDO stuff. (Currently it's statically maintained, or pulled from flat 
text files by another apache perl module...)

> I'm assuming that it's worth learning something about mod_perl
> regardless of which method is employed?

Knowing mod_perl is great anyway, and isn't that hard. It gives you power to 
write your own Auth layers, etc... I highly recommend O'Reilly's "Writing 
Apache Modules in Perl and C".

If you want to go the traditional CGI way, and don't want a heavy mod_perl 
server then FastCGI is great for turning a slow CGI into a persistent app.

-- 
. Trevor Phillips             -           http://jurai.murdoch.edu.au/ . 
: Web Technical Administrator     -          T.Phillips at murdoch.edu.au : 
| IT Services                        -              Murdoch University | 
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