I've looked around and haven't found what I want, and being a perl hack, decided to write it. The problem is that I'm chasing my tail from meta-data and persistence, so I come to the masters for guidance.

My goal is an opensource web content management system based on an object-oriented database. One could simply express the form of a dynamic web site like this -- for example a book-club web site:

small group: leader(person), location, schedule
  members(person)
  books discussed(book): date, summary
  news: date, headline
   picture
person: name, address, phone, email
 news(news)
book: Title, author, publisher, number of pages, cover image, isbn
 reviews: writer(person), date, stars(1,2,3,4), headline, summary, tex
+t

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This web site has three main sections: small groups, people, and books. Each of these sections have multiple content, group members, personal news, book reviews, etc. There's also a rough sense of path:
    /small group/Visionaries/members/Joe Smith
or
    /book/Wonders And Miracles/isbn

This means that the site creator has to be able to enter the meta-data for his site structure, and then of course the meta-data has a structure of its own (the meta-meta-data). I want both the data and the meta-data to saved to disk (ie persistent), and (why not) I'd like to use the same tools to implement the meta-meta-data:

classes: name, baseclass, envelope, view-template, edit-template, new,
+ update, del
  roles: name, access
  attribute: name, basetype, size, default, validation, indexing
basetypes: name, view, edit, update

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I'm trying to get up to speed on modules like Class::Struct and Class::Constructor as well as persistance modules like Storable and Tie::Persistent. I had a pleasant diversion into POE, but decided that that's probably not where I'm going (although I might be mistaken) because it looks to offer persistence through a background task. I don't want to use Persistent::MySQL because there's no SQL on my target server. I also benifit for portability and ease-of-install if I can avoid DBI.

Firstly -- do I want my CMS's objects to be perl objects at all? If I write my own object interpreter I can effeciently implement persistence, access control, etc at the cost of re-inventing the wheel. But the structure is simple enough it is doable.

Secondly, if I'm using perl's objects what's the best collection of Modules to do meta-data -> objects w/ persistence?

Thanks for your enlightened perspective on my prediciment.

j

In reply to metadata confusion for new perl CMS by jhanna

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