Relationship between directories and inheritance

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

Monks,

I've been building a web app using CGI Application and hit a point where I need to split the application up into different folders, yet keep inheritince alive and well. I need some help splitting the application up.

Simplified, the directory structure of application looks like this:

www
+ App
  App.pm
   + Admin
     Admin.pm
      + Super
        Super.pm
      + Regular
        Regular.pm
   + User
     User.pm
      + Super
        Super.pm
      +Regular
        Regular.pm
[download]

Package names look like this:

App
App::Admin
App::Admin::Super

I need to move the Admin part of the application into a different www folder while still using App as the base class for Admin:

www
+ App
  App.pm
   + User
     User.pm
      + Super
        Super.pm
      +Regular
        Regular.pm
www_other
   + Admin
     Admin.pm
      + Super
        Super.pm
      + Regular
        Regular.pm
[download]

Any suggestions for how to go about spliting the application up or general inheritance suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Tatnall

"Recognizing who we aren't is only the first step toward knowing who we are." - Os Guinness

Comment on Relationship between directories and inheritance Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Relationship between directories and inheritance by chromatic (Archbishop) on Nov 13, 2006 at 20:52 UTC
There's no relationship between directory layout and inheritance in Perl, unless you have some sort of non-technical convention. You have to specify module relationships yourself, explicitly, with code.	[reply]
Re: Relationship between directories and inheritance by pajout (Curate) on Nov 13, 2006 at 16:45 UTC
From my point of view, you have some good reasons for the described structure of perl MODULES. It is ok. My strategy in the very similar cases is to keep my modules in some special directory, for instance, myperlmodules, which is NOT part of 'www'. In 'www' I have only small perl scripts, which do something as `use lib "/whenever/i/have/myperlmodules"; use App::Admin::Super; App::Admin::Super::somemethod();` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Relationship between directories and inheritance by philcrow (Priest) on Nov 13, 2006 at 17:05 UTC
We take this a step further and build the modules as if they were for CPAN release, then inject them into our private CPAN mirror and install them as regular modules. No use libs are then required. This also urges us to build the dists professionally, ie with manifests, tests, etc. As for inheritence, if one module needs to inherit from a parent, a simple `use base 'Parent';` [download] is usually enough. Phil	[reply] [d/l]