WebCritic Revisited
As I mentioned in my last post I rewrote one of my personal apps (WebCritic) to use Web::Simple over the Thanksgiving holiday. It was exciting, writing one of the first apps to use the brand new Web::Simple. Of course, that also meant that I had to read incomplete doc, deal with examples that didn’t work, and in general just deal with the whole hassle of an immature project. Of course that was rewarding though, because I got a chance to help beef up the doc some, fix the broken examples, and convince mst to add a basic feature that will allow me to run the server standalone.
There are two cool, unqiue features of Web::Simple that I’ve used so far. The first is the use of HTML::Tags, which is undocumented so far, but super easy to use. See my last, and already linked to, post for an example of that one. Or if you are curious see my use of it. The nice thing is that I can write my html all nicely formatted or whatever, and the server outputs it without extraneous whitespace.
The other feature I’ve used allows really dumb, static serving for a Web::Simple app. Normally that would be discouraged, but because my app is meant to be run by devs from the commandline I kinda need this. Check it out:
dispatch {
sub (/) { ... },
sub (/criticisms) { ... },
sub (/static/**) {
my $file = $_[1];
open my $fh, '<', "static/$file" or return [ 404, [ 'Content-type', 'text/html' ], [ 'file not found']];
local $/ = undef;
my $data = <$fh>;
close $fh or return [ 500, [ 'Content-type', 'text/html' ], [ 'Internal Server Error'] ];
[ 200, [ 'Content-type' => 'text/html' ], [ $data ] ]
},
};
So basically the static matcher just reads in a file under the static location and spits it back out. I haven’t checked what happens if you put ‘..’ in the path or anything like that, but again, this is for local usage, so I won’t stress much over it.
And because Web::Simple isn’t really geared to be a standalone server, I also redid the view part, which was entirely ExtJS, to use jQuery. Basically to use the Ext Grid I was loading the largish Ext javascript, the Ext css, and numerous images. jQuery really solves different, more basic problems, whereas Ext is an entire UI framework. I love Ext and think that all commercial, large scale projects should consider it. On the other hand, Ext has a weird license which makes me nervous including it in an OS project. Technically that’s ok, but if someone were to use my OS app to make money, I think they might have to pay the Ext people, which doesn’t sit nicely with me. Also it’s a huge framework that I was using probably 5% of for my project.
So instead of using the Ext Grid I just have a sortable table with columns that can be toggled. I do still miss the qtip (nice mouseover text) and general organization that I got from using the Ext framework, but I think the former can probably be solved with some research, and the latter is just my lack of knowledge coding “bare metal” javascript. Of course it’s not really bare metal since I’m using jQuery, but it’s certainly much closer.
In general this has been a lot of fun. Normally I’m a fan of large frameworks. At work we use (and I love!) ExtJS, Catalyst, Moose, and DBIx::Class. All of them (except maybe DBIx::Class) are probably the largest frameworks in their respective fields. But I get some perverse pleasure (and I do mean perverse) from using such a minimalistic toolset. I’d say that the switch to jQuery was warranted as Ext can significantly slow down the browser. The switch to Web::Simple over CGIApp was pretty much just for fun, but I learned a lot, and that’s certainly worth something.
Lastly, since revisiting this I realize that I should release it to CPAN. Once it’s complete (which depends on the next release of Web::Simple) I’ll release it. I’d expect my end of that to be done before the end of the week. As for Web::Simple, I’m not sure what else needs to be done to consider it release worthy, but I’ll be doing what I can to make that happen as well.
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