Re: Advocating Perl...

Thank you (and everyone) very much for getting through my rant, and commenting.

At the time this project was done, which was 2000 to 2001, I knew about Mason, bricolage, and I think OpenInteract at some time before but it looks much more grown up. Will certainly study all these.

That said, well, search.cpan.org searching has been down for some days ("You don't have permission to access /search on this server") so your link doesn't work for me. Seems the OpenInteract site at cwinters.com mentioned on CPAN is down too. And no OpenInteract articles at perl.com. Ah, but now I've found openinteract.com from google, and now the sourceforge project, when I was about to give up.

Hopefully O'Reilly will find OpenInteract or P5EE books to be a new source of income sometime soon.

Okay, here's a question. I've got a CGI based intranet system to track billed time for a 40 person company. To that, I've added a CGI::Application Direct Mail system which was fun, and we are starting to plan a larger financial system which I've been thinking would be CGI::Application probably unless there is something better. The client has been very happy with these systems but I would like to integrate better and make it easy to sell/deploy. And it's time to move it all into mod_perl, and with sensitive data to PostgreSql too I think.

How hard is it to port a CGI::Application to OpenInteract for example?

Would you recommend OpenInteract for something like this, basically a corporate intranet/extranet server for a company or division under say 200 employees? Perhaps P5EE is already solid enough to implement and save time with it? I expect that mod_perl will make it work not just quickly, but Real Fast And Better Than X (tm). Would be nice to advertise that Perl makes it so.

UPDATED 2/12: According to Chris Winter's posttwo days ago on the OpenInteract mailing list, OpenInteract is apparently going through a major rewrite (well he says not a total rewrite, but a refactoring which will require code changes..) which won't be done until the summer. Might still be possible to use parts of OpenInteract so I will keep looking at it. Thanks again.

Comment on Re: Advocating Perl...

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CGI::Application and OpenInteract..
by lachoy (Parson) on Feb 10, 2002 at 20:52 UTC

This is verging on a discussion that may be more appropriate on the OpenInteract mailing list (see Sourceforge), but...

The main OpenInteract website is openinteract.org rather than .com. I'm not sure what the status of the .com website is -- I'll look into it.

P5EE is (or will be) really an interface rather than something you can use directly. That is, if OpenInteract were a P5EE-compliant web application container, you could create an application to run there and it would also run in the libservlet or the aforementioned OpenFrame containers as well.

From what I've seen, porting an existing CGI::Application project to OpenInteract would entail some work but it wouldn't require a rewrite. One feature they both have in common is a action (in OI a handler, in CGI::Application a script) that has multiple operations (in OI a task, in CGI::Application a run mode). So you might have a 'user' action that has the tasks 'search', 'show', 'edit', 'remove'. I think OI has this more centralized than CGI::App, but I'm not certain.

However, if you're using CGI::Application right now and it works well for you, you should probably consider sticking with it and making your application mod_perl-friendly if necessary. OpenInteract has a number of other features -- like object/datasource mapping, authentication, security system, components, theming, etc. -- that for a small development team might require a steeper learning curve that is better spent on making the app work. (Depends on the size of the team, looming deadlines, etc.)

Not to discourage you from using OI, it's just that I hate to see people throw away work that's doing what it's supposed to do :-)

Chris
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