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CGI::App 4.02 released, new plugins and a new wiki!

markjugg on 2005-07-31T03:33:09

CGI::Application 4.02 was just sent to CPAN. Look for it coming to a mirror near you. The changes since 4.01 are:

  • Documented existence of CGI::Application::Plugin::FillInForm.
  • path_info option to mode_param now supports negative index numbers to grab the run mode name from the other end of the PATH_INFO. (Thilo Planz)
  • Altered how "start_mode" default is set, allowing it to be set through the hook system in the 'init' phase. Existing applications should be unaffected.
  • Return value of run_modes() was documented.
  • Integrate more examples of using plugins into the documentation.
  • 'error' hook was added, which is executed just before error_mode() might be called. An example use of this would be a logging plugin that wants to log that the application died. Although it's unlikely to change, it is marked as experimental for now.
In other CGI::Application news, Cees Hek is planning a revision to his TT plugin this weekend that adds the neat feature of having the CGI::App object itself available in the template, with the idea that you could do something some like easily reference a query parameter or session element if you wanted to: 
    c.session.id
I also hear that a HTML::Prototype plugin may be soon to follow. HTML::Prototype provides easy access to the AJAX JavaScript that provides some of the fancy effects for Ruby-on-Rails.

Meanwhile, Michael Graham has released revisions to his Forward and Config::General plugins that should be visible soon as well.

CGI::Application::Plugin::Forward simply keeps track of the current run mode when you forward control to another one. So instead of: 

 return $self->other_run_mode();

You do:

 return $self->forward('other_run_mode');
And that tracking happenings.

This will help templating related plugins that want default to a template name equal to the current run mode. With forward(), that just got a lot easier to do reliably.

Finally, come and see our totally re-factored wiki at http://www.cgi-app.org/, now Kwiki powered, but with a minium of CamelCaps!