On the train back to cornwall I planned to carry working on my father-in-law's website from lathos's IBM tutorial, but within about 10 minutes realised I needed to download some more modules from CPAN in order to do anything useful.
Authentication and uploads shouldn't be extras in something like maypole, this was one of the things I hated about developing ASP is that fairly common tasks weren't ready-rolled out of the box and you had to download and install dodgy shareware to do basic common things like authentication, uploading, sending email, etc. I hope maypole starts to ship with at least enough to do a basic useful website (i.e. simple authentication, simple email, and simple upload plugins bundled/required when you install it). At the moment you need to download and install a new plugin module every hour or two of development, which sucks if you are on a train, staying with friends or connect with of a dialup modem. Obviously after a couple more solid days of development I will have downloaded all the modules that appear to be missing, and will start hunting for new ones but at the start of the learning curve I would much prefer if most/all of the common functionality you are going to need or use straightaway was included or at least optionally installed when you install through CPAN and have a warning when you download or install by hand reccomending you also fetch and install them.
Anyway - luckily, this gave me the incentive to hack SpringGraph some more. I managed to get a prototype of graphviz style record shapes, as used by autodia, drawing correctly via GD, now I just have to refactor the drawing part of the springgraph code some more and to use them and draw the arrows slightly differently. Of course this means splitting it into more subs and generally improving the design anyway. This means a new Autodia using SpringGraph for drawing and/or layout is now about a week away.
du -sk ~/Perl/CPAN
2724028/Users/nick/Perl/CPAN
I just mirror CPAN locally on my laptop, updating it with rsync when convenient. I've not yet found a need to mirror backpan
Authentication and uploads shouldn't be extras in something like maypole
Yes, they should, because the Maypole core should be as small as possible so that development can remain focused. But there should be a Bundle::Maypole which packages all the auxilliary bits up. I look forward to seeing it on CPAN!
Re:Maypole core
TeeJay on 2004-07-05T09:16:59
Yes, that would help.As would pointers to it, and reccomendations on which modules you are likely to use/need almost straight away.
