On 11/18/05, Simon Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Hi all, > I'm back, temporarily, and in need of some recreational coding, having > thought about some issues to do with making Maypole easier to get up and > running. It dawned on me this morning that I would like this to happen: > > % maypole-install dbi:mysql:thingy > # Creating directory thingy > # Writing thingy/Thingy.pm > # Writing thingy/Thingy/DBI.pm > # Writing thingy/Thingy/Widget.pm > # Writing thingy/Thingy/Wodget.pm > # Writing thingy/Thingy/User.pm > > <Perl> push @INC, "/home/simon/maypole-sites/thingy"; </Perl> > <location /thingy> > SetHandler perl-script > PerlHandler Thingy > </location> > > Now I'm working out how to get from here to there. > > The first thing we need to do is have the factory templates in a known > location. I propose we do this by moving templates/ under lib/Maypole/ > so that they'll be automatically installed by MakeMaker. Then the default > installation would create a symlink from thingy/templates/factory to the > known install path. I won't provide a patch for this because it requires lots > of svn messing. > > The next step is to write my magic installation thing. I can work on > that. :) > > Does this seem like a reasonable avenue to pursue? If so, Aaron, could you > do the svn magic? > > Once we've got this working, I'm going to have a blitz on error > reporting. :) > > Oh, and I commend http://blog.simon-cozens.org/post/view/993 to you.
The idea of a command to build a skeleton app is cool. Getting your very first bog standard Maypole app up and running seems to be a major threshold for new users. Once you've done it a few times, it's a doddle, a dozen lines of code and you've got a running app to play with, but time and again we see people on the list struggling to get something that compiles and runs. If we can get them past that stage with the minimum of fuss, we'll have happier new users. But beyond installation support, personally I'm not attracted by the Rails/Catalyst thing of extensive use of scripts to build more complex apps. Seems to me that anything a script can figure out, can be figured out by the app itself during startup. Installing the templates to a standard location would be good too. In fact there are now several sets of standard templates - the TT templates in the Maypole distro, a set of Mason templates in MasonX::Maypole, and a set of TT and a set of Mason templates in Maypole::FormBuilder. Have a look at Devel::Maypole. It's unfinished business, not least because it won't install from CPAN (you need to have Devel::Maypole installed before you can install Devel::Maypole...). It uses Module::Build's persistent config mechanism to install resource kits (or rather, to remember where they're installed to), including templates, config files, and SQL. The idea was to support easier testing, rather than installing complete applications, but it could evolve towards that eventually. Anything you can do on error reporting would be great! I still don't understand that stuff very well. It seems particularly hard to debug Maypole apps, but I haven't got a clue why. d. ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today Register for a JBoss Training Course. Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005. For more info visit: http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_idv28&alloc_id845&op=click _______________________________________________ Maypole-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/maypole-devel
