I've used HTML::Template a little, mainly in the Secret Santa project I did this past Christmas for my wife's family. One thing I disliked was using the normal syntax: <TMPL_VAR NAME=IMAGE_SRC> -- it made looking at it difficult (it wasn't always easy to tell what was an HTML tag, what was plain text, and what was HTML::Template stuff), and it made it impossible to validate my pages before they had data.

Fortunately, there's an alternate syntax: wrap the syntax in HTML comments: <!-- TMPL_VAR NAME=IMAGE_SRC --> does the job. It uses more characters, true, but it gets highlighted different than HTML tags, as well, and that's worth a lot.

And why do I have to say "NAME=" every time? That gets annoying. As it turns out, I can simply say: <!-- TMPL_VAR IMAGE_SRC -->, and that, too will get the job done.

Finally, what about those times when I want to define a template, but have it broken into parts, too? Basically, I want HTML::Template to behave a little like SSI. No worries; there's a TMPL_INCLUDE tag that can do this: <!-- TMPL_INCLUDE NAME="filename.tmpl" -->.

I've been reading a lot of posts lately on the CGI::App mailing list about using CGI::Application::ValidateRM (RM == Run Mode); I finally went and checked it out.

Anyways, it looks like the combination of CGI::App::ValRM with CGI::App could greatly simplify any form validations I need to do on the site, which will in turn make me very happy!

I had some success last night with the My::Portal CGI::Application superclass I'm building -- I actually got it working with CGI::Wiki::Simple (after I debugged the latter to fix some delegation issues!). Now that I know the "proof-of-concept" works, I'm ready to start in on some other issues.

The first issue is: how can I specify different directories for different applications to search for templates, while retaining the default directory so that the superclass can build the final page? I could always simply keep all templates in a single directory and simply prefix them, but that seems inelegant, somehow. I'll need to explore how HTML::Template integration works with CGI::App.

Second, and closely related: how do I want it to look, in the end? I could see keeping the design we have -- it's clean, simple, and yet somehow functionally elegant. Okay, I'm exaggerating -- it's your standard three-column with header and footer. But it goes with the idea of blocks of content. I need to think about that.

I saw a design idea for a WikiWikiWeb today, though, that totally changed my ideas of how a Wiki should look. I hadn't been to Wikipedia for some time, but a Google link to Gaston Julia showed up on Slashdot as it shut down a site in Australia, and so I visited it. I like the new design -- it separates out the common links needed into a nice left menu, and puts a subset of that at the top and bottom of the main column as well, using nice borders to visually separate things. I much prefer it to PhpWiki's default style, as well as to anything else I've really seen so far relating to Wiki layout.

I've had occasion to need to grab a specific set of files from a large directory -- most recently, I needed to grab some specific access logs from our Apache logfiles at work.

Enter find.

I needed to get all files newer than a specific date, and with the pattern 'sitename-access_log.timestamp.gz'. I then needed to tar up these files and grab them for processing. So, here's what I did:

• The -newer filename tells find to locate files newer than filename.
• The -regex flag tells find to locate files matching the regular expression. The regex that find uses is a little strange, however, and didn't follow many conventions I know; for one thing, it's assumed that the pattern you write will match against the entire string, and not just a portion of it. What I ended up using was -regex '.*access_log.*gz', and that worked.
• The -printf flag tells find to format the printing. This is useful when using the output of find in another program. For instance, tar likes a list of filenames... so I used printf "%p ", which separated each filename with a space.

I then backticked my full find statement and used it as the final argument to a tar command; voila! instant tar file with the files I need!

I've been struggling with how to use modules at runtime instead of compile time (I even wrote about this once before). I finally figured it out:

my $module = "ROX::Filer";
eval "use $module";
die "couldn't load module : $!n" if ($@);

Now I just need to figure out how to create objects from dynamic module names...!

Update: Creating objects from dynamic names is as easy as dynamically loading the module at run-time:

my $obj = $module->new();

One continual pain for me with perl is when I need to try to find the location of a specific module on my filesystem so that I can examine it myself; I end up first having to find out what my @INC path is, then having to dig through it until I find the module. Fortunately, I'm not the only one; somebody posted a solution to this problem on Perl Monks:

Updated: The original listing presented didn't work! The following one, garnered from a comment to the original PM post, does, and is what I'm now using.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use File::Spec::Functions qw/catfile/;

my @loaded = grep {
    eval "require $_";
    !$@ ? 1 : ($@ =~ s/(@INC contains: Q@INCE)//, warn ("Failed loading $_: $@"), 0);
} @ARGV;

my @pm = map catfile(split '::') . (/.pmz/ ? '' : '.pm'), @loaded;

print "@INC{@pm}n";
__END__

=pod

=head1 NAME

whichpm - lists real paths of specified modules

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  editor `whichpm Bar`

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Analogous to the UN*X command which.

=cut

Just place it in your $PATH and let 'er rip!

I was reading a thread on the cgiapp mailing list today from several of the core developers about developing a book on CGI::Application. In it, several mentioned that it might/should center around CGI::App and a handful of oft-used modules. One of those modules is Class::DBI.

I took a gander at Class::DBI over at CPAN, and it looks absolutely amazing, and at the same time perhaps too abstract. Basically, you create a number of packages and/or packages, one for each table you'll be using in your application, and one to establish your basic connection. Then, each package creates an object instance of the connection, and defines a number of properties: the name of the table, the columns you'll be using, and then the relations it has to other tables (has_a( col_name => 'Package::Name'); has_many( col_name => 'Package::Name'); might_have(col_name => 'Package::Name');) etc.

Then you use the module/packages you need in your script, and you can then use object-oriented notation to do things like insert rows, update rows, search a table, select rows, etc. And it looks fairly natural.

I like the idea of data abstraction like this. I see a couple issues, however:

1. I don't like the idea of one package per table; that gets so abstract as to make development come to a stand-still, especially during initial development. However, once development is sufficiently advanced, I could see doing this, particularly for large projects; it could vastly simplify many regular DBI calls.
2. I like using SQL. If I need to debug why something isn't working when I interact with the database, I want to have absolute control over the language. Abstracting the SQL means I don't have that fine-grained control that helps me debug.

So, for now, I'll stick with straight DBI... but this is an interesting avenue to explore.

I just ran into this not long ago, and wish I'd discovered it years ago. Basically, Ctrl-S suspends a process, while Ctrl-Q resumes it. This is useful when in g/vim or screen and you manage to lock up your application because you accidently hit Ctrl-S when reaching for another key combo.

Due to my cursory reading in the Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition, earlier this week, I've been investigating the use autouse pragma, to see if it will indeed solve my issue of wanting to use different modules based on the current situation. Unfortunately, I cannot find any documentation on it in perldoc.

I remember seeing something about wrapping this stuff into a BEGIN block, but that would require knowing certain information immediately, and I might need the code to work through some steps before getting there.

Fortunately, this node just appeared on Perl Monks today, and I got to see other ways of doing it:

• The if module lets you do something like use if $type eq 'x', "Some::Module"; However, $type must be known at compile time (i.e., it's based on system info or on @ARGV); this probably wouldn't work in a web-based application.
• Use require and import instead: if $type wq 'ex') { require Some::Module; Some::Module->import if Some::Module->can("import"); } If your module doesn't export anything, you can even omit the call to import.
• Use an eval: if ($type eq 'x') { eval "use Some::Module"; } This gets around the import problem, but could possibly run into other compile time issues.

So, basically, I already had the tools to do the job; just needed to examine the problem more.

So, I'm a bit of an idiot... it's been so long since I looked at CGI::App, and yet I felt I had such a grasp on it, that I overlooked the obvious step: look at the manual!

In particular, there's a whole series of methods that are used to tailor CGI:App to your particular needs, and these include cgiapp_init(), cgiapp_prerun(), and cgiapp_postrun().

• cgiapp_init() is used to perform application specific initialization behaviour, and is called immediately before the setup() method. It can be used to load settings from elsewhere; if it were called only from a superclass from which other modules inherited, it would then provide common settings for all modules.
• cgiapp_prerun() is called immediately before the selected run-mode. If it were called only by your superclass, you could perform items such as authorization or even form validation; this would then be standard for all your applications. (You can use the $self->prerun_mode('mode') call to to override the selected run-mode, for instance, thus allowing you to redirect to a different mode if a user isn't permitted there.)
• cgiapp_postrun() is called after the run-mode has returned its output, but before http headers have been generated or anything sent to the web browser. Again, if defined in a superclass, it means that you could then place the run-mode output in a specific place within a larger template, and even call other routines to fill in other parts of the main template. You could even check to see if certain parameters were passed to the page, and change the type of output you send back (XML, PDF, image, etc.), allowing you to have a common query element that changes the output type (e.g., a 'print' parameter that returns a PDF or a stripped down template).

In addition, you could specify in the superclass that you're using CGI::Simple for the query object (using the cgiapp_get_query method), or you could rewrite the load_tmpl() method to use Template::Toolkit or some other templating system, etc.

Doesn't look so crazy anymore...