[cgiapp] CGI::App Best Practices

["William McKee" <suppressed>]

> Does this list have a FAQ?  I think I have seen questions very similar to
> this many times.

Even better than a FAQ would be a best practices document that would 
include guidelines from the vast experience of this group. Although I've 
been using CGI::App for over a year, I am still finding many ways in which 
my solutions are sub-optimal. I keep using CGI::App because it provides a 
nice middle-ground between rolling my own mod_perl handlers vs. using a 
pre-packaged web application framework a la Mason or, worse, .Net.

However, I keep finding myself reinventing my code as I read this mailing 
list. It's a great learning experience, but I think that there's got to be 
a better way. I know that Jesse has made available the 
CGI::Application::Mailform module and Sam has written the 
CGI::Application::Mailpage, but they are both extremely simple examples 
involving a single module with all of two runmodes rather than the beasts 
that most of us are developing. A more useful example would be the basic 
framework for a system that allows users to log into a website, edit their 
records and search the records as well as for an administrator to perform 
maintenance on the database.

I think CGI::App could be more useful to more developers if we made a 
framework available to get started with. I'm a small software development 
shop and would prefer to join forces with a group of other developers to 
build a web application framework rather than try to roll my own and keep 
it up-to-date. I'm doing it by myself right now because I haven't found a 
solution that I like!

Here are some of the areas I'd like to see addressed in such a guide:
	- project management (similar to the message that Jesse recently posted 
to the modperl mailing list which documents how he stores files for a 
project)
	- designing a mid-size to large application with CGI::App (i.e., how to 
break up your code)
	- sharing common functions
	- configuration files (do you use the instantiation script, a text file, 
a module, a database?)
	- configuring mod_perl to run your CGI::App modules

I feel like there is a group of folks here who "get it" and the rest of us 
who are bumbling along trying to grasp the best ways to use these tools. 
TMTOWTDI cuts in two ways. Perhaps a FAQ or some guidelines can reduce 
some of the confusion that comes from the freedom to make our own choices.

Thanks for listening!
William

-- 
 Lead Developer
 Knowmad Services Inc. || Internet Applications & Database Integration
 http://www.knowmad.com
 


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