Well I'll pitch in here since I'm probably pretty close to your target audience. I'm not a web developer, I'm a biologist turned bioinformatician with a few years of perl experience, and no web dev background. I didn't know that web frameworks existed a year ago, but I needed to build web interfaces to my databases and tools so I started googleing. I was thrilled to find Jesse's CGI::App article on perl.com. Also looked at Mason, Maypole, EmbedPerl etc. Non-felt quite right. CA seemed like the right combo of easy to pick up, but big enough for room to expand. Some thoughts on the recent posts:
Template Toolkit is a fabulous piece of work, and if I were god I'd make it CA's default. Since I'm not, I think Michael's AnyTemplate should play a very prominent role in CA's future, and in this book. It supports CA's flexibility. You could pitch HTML Template for those who expect their data structures to be simple, but for complex db schemas the combo of TT and CDBI allowing me to drill deeply into my db from the template saved me A LOT of code writing and is incredibly useful. If I were reading your book a year ago, I would have definitely wanted to learn about TT. I was equally excited to find CDBI - I immediately threw away hundreds of lines of code. If you are starting out and using a db I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to use CDBI, so I think it too should be well covered. I got CA up and running pretty quickly, but integrating all the bits and pieces to build a mature app has taken me quite a while (session, auth.*, config, etc.) Having all of those pieces together in one book would have saved me a lot of time. BTW, I think if you are going to push best practices like MVC early on, you should push best practices like testing, XHTML, and CSS. If you've writing for beginners like me, might as well get us into good habits before we have time to develop the bad one. Barry -----Original Message----- From: Michael Graham [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, September 08, 2005 7:55 PM To: cgiapp@lists.erlbaum.net Subject: Re: [cgiapp] Re: RFC: synopsis for CGI::App book > > FWIW, I agree. I think it's very important to define the target > > audience(s) and the goals of the book. This should really be teaching > > CGI::App development. [snip] > I told my friend in Perl there is always more than one way to do it but > how far can you take that before everything goes fuzzy? Very good points. I agree you should make certain technology decisions and run with them. For instance, I'll agree that the issue of persistent environments (like mod_perl) can be safely tucked away in its own chapter or appendix. Templating is a bit of a special case because the cgiapp community (and the Perl community at large) is so "enthusiastically" divided over what is the "best" templating system. My personal belief is we should accept the split and embrace all the different choices out there. (That's why I wrote CAP::AnyTemplate.) So the reason I'm suggesting you showcase TT more is not because I prefer it over HT (although I do). I'm suggesting you give it equal play because I don't think it would be a good advertisement for CGI::Application to suggest that that C::A primarly works with HT, and the other templating choices are afterthoughts. For instance, you can type: use CGI::Application::Plugin::AnyTemplate; and you instantly have a simple, unified interface to the three or four most common Perl templating systems out there. That's pretty integrated. I'm not suggesting you push AnyTemplate, but I am pointing out that just because it's in a plugin doesn't make it an afterthought and it doesn't make it any less easy to use. As most of us on this list know, pretty well all the plugins are very easy to use, very well integrated, and each adds great functionality. Their main disadvantage at the moment is that their documentation is all over CPAN, so you have to go digging to find out what the best practices actually are. But I think that here is one of the great opportunities for a book like this: to take all the diverse plugins that are out there and make a coherent and fully documented guide to the platform as a whole. In another message, you wrote: > The reason I split this into two chapters is that CGI::Apps integration > with HTML::Template means you can get an immediate advantage over straight > CGI.pm right away. While CGI::Application did originally evolve from CGI programming, today it is a complete "enterprise-quality" web application platform with a feature set rivaling Catalyst, Ruby on Rails, various Java frameworks, etc. So even though its roots are in CGI programming, does that really matter any more? Should we be thinking of it in terms of "improved CGI programming"? IMO, as a developer, all we really need to know about CGI.pm is the API of the 'query' method. And 95% of that is how to use 'query->param', which isn't all that hard. It seems to me that the chapter sequence you've chosen echoes CGI::Application's evolutionary advancements over CGI programming: Ch 1: Common Gateway Interface Ch 2: Architecture of a CGI::App Ch 3: Run modes Ch 4: Templates ... While this is historically true, I wonder: how common are 'plain' CGI programmers these days? I would think that you would be more likely to find PHP programmers or users of other web frameworks, or developers who have no web experience. I think that some better starting points might be: * separating code and design with templates * application run modes (e.g. browse, read, edit, add, delete) * sessions * processing forms (validation and sticky forms) These are topics very familiar to most experienced web programmers, but straightforward enough that non-web programmers can pick them up pretty quickly. They also happen to be features of CGI::Application that are both extremely powerful and at the same time very easy to use, so you get a lot of bang for your buck right up front. Michael --- Michael Graham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- Web Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/cgiapp@lists.erlbaum.net/ http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cgiapp&r=1&w=2 To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- Web Archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/cgiapp@lists.erlbaum.net/ http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=cgiapp&r=1&w=2 To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
