Using perl for Document Management

freddo411 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Monks,

In my next project I'll be making a lightweight document management system. The specs are fairly simple:
* use existing infrastructure: Oracle DB, perl on vanilla cgi webserver and existing authentication system
* Provide storage and access to .PDF, .xls, .doc etc.
* Support Metadata like keywords

I could write this, but I'm sure there a lots of existing solutions that I could modify. I did a search on "document management" and I didn't find anything even close to what I was thinking of. CPAN search didn't yield anything that appeared to be applicable (I'm sure I'm missing something...). I also looked on sourceforge, and found some projects but they look like they assume MYSQL and apache.

Anyone have any helpful pointers to either frameworks, full blown apps, or just Modules that might make this easier? I already know and use CGI::App, HTML::Template, Class::DBI

Cheers

--Fred

-------------------------------------
Nothing is too wonderful to be true
-- Michael Faraday

Comment on Using perl for Document Management

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Re: Using perl for Document Management by jonadab (Parson) on Jan 08, 2005 at 00:08 UTC
Bryce Harrington is working on something like this for the Open Clip Art Library. I believe his CPAN id is BRYCE. You might want to collaborate with him. The DMS he's working on doesn't rely on Oracle, but the capabilities you describe are exactly the sort of things he wants it to do, ultimately. I'm not sure how much of it is done, but he's released several alpha versions, so I know he has done at least some significant actual coding on it, in addition to planning and thinking it through. "In adjectives, with the addition of inflectional endings, a changeable long vowel (Qamets or Tsere) in an open, propretonic syllable will reduce to Vocal Shewa. This type of change occurs when the open, pretonic syllable of the masculine singular adjective becomes propretonic with the addition of inflectional endings." — Pratico & Van Pelt, BBHG, p68	[reply]
Re: Using perl for Document Management by Thilosophy (Curate) on Jan 08, 2005 at 01:20 UTC
Since you are using Oracle you should definitely have a look at Oracle Text which ships with the database. It offers full text indexing for many document types.	[reply]
Re: Using perl for Document Management by naChoZ (Curate) on Jan 09, 2005 at 15:55 UTC
I'm actually beginning something like this myself. The goal is something flexible enough to be a doc man or a knowledgebase. My company wants some extras like content rating (similar to reputation) and other things that make it useful in a phone support capacity. Essentially I was going to borrow heavily from the concepts, schema, and eventually some of the appearance of phplinks and rewrite it in Perl using Class::DBI. I stumbled upon a commercial app, Lore, which is almost a mirror image of what I envisioned anyway (except for being php/mysql-bound). I started writing my own anyway, but I'm only a few hours into it. Tough for me to find that kind of time. I'm building it in a fashion similar to the RTAPI with which I've become extremely familiar. So if anyone might like to participate, let me know, I'll put it on sourceforge or something. -- "A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right." -- Thomas Paine naChoZ	[reply]