Existing webapp on which to build?

[mobiGeek]

Not a Perl-coding question, but a Perl-community question.

A friend of mine wants to create a website to let users register and track personal statistics over time (e.g. weight, salary, # of kids, tax returns, etc...) and let them generate reports with said data.

Instead of building a complete user & registration system, I thought that there must be a decent existing system on which to build.

He started looking around and has come up with a couple of PHP solutions, but before he goes down that road too far, I'd really like to point him to at least one Perl system that has similar functionality (he's an MS-technology junkie but wants to try his hand at something non-MS for this project).

Suggestions on projects/code bundles/homepages I can point him at?

Thanks in advance!

[perrin]

There's a good list here.

[lachoy]

It doesn't have a reporting or per-user data tracking system built in, but OpenInteract has a user/group system along with session management, database access, security, and an application framework ready for you to use. You'll still have to do some work, but at least a lot of the boring stuff is done for you.

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode

[PetaMem]

Hi,

you could point him to YaWPS. It is a perl based portal skeleton. Working with mod_perl2 already. We used it for our own portal but I have to admit, that significant code changes had to be done. Especially user management is quite low level in YaWPS.

Bye
 PetaMem

[dash2]

For a full-featured Content Management System, try Bricolage (search google). Or maybe, for user registration Slashcode?

But it sounds like you really want just user registration, login and logout, plus some custom database stuff. The danger of going with a full-fledged system is that you have to learn the system, which can take as long as just writing the code - especially if the code is fairly simple. Also, you add another layer, which means that you want to make very sure that whatever you choose is 100% reliable, and very well documented. (Debugging your own code is boring enough without having to debug other people's code.)

For user registration, maybe build it with CGI::Session? You could also use User::Identity but I haven't played with it, and maybe it looks too complex for this stuff. Alternatively, you could integrate it with Apache authentication (check out the Apache:: namespace on CPAN).

For the database stuff, recommend a database object layer such as Class::DBI or Tangram. This will mean less SQL for him to write. I haven't seen PHP that can do that. (Except when I've written it :o)

I believe GD::Graph has great modules for generating graphs using the GD image library. PHP can generate images, but bewarned that there are problems using recent versions of GD unless you have an up-to-date PHP (like 4.2 or better).

And for generating HTML, there are loads of solutions. If he's naturally a programmer, just CGI would be fine, but if he likes to write HTML, then there's HTML::Template and Template::Toolkit. Mason is also good, but is rather heavyweight and more for use with mod_perl... I imagine this is more of a CGI job.

andramoiennepemousapolutropon