BBC and 'Perl on Rails'

[grep]

An interesting (if technically light) blog about the BBC's Perl on Rails

[zby]

There is an insightful thread on the Catalyst mailing list about this. In summary it looks that:
• The code has not been released - so all the discussion is a bit void
• The reasons for it's development seem to be based on misunderstandings and 'white listing' of allowed modules (plus only Perl 5.6 allowed)
• It looks like Siemens, which in some way administers BBC working environment, is very reluctant to white list new CPAN modules - so the BBC developers reinvent on a grand scale.
If someone knows someone from Siemens involved in the whitelisting process - then please ask him why it is so slow and ask how the Perl community could help them to make it faster.

[Ovid]

I work for the BBC on a team that's very close to the team which developed "Perl on Rails". There's been a bit of unnecessary hype about this. The problem with Siemens, specifically, is that they've been told by us to be very cautious about what they allow since "security" is so important. Siemans got a bit overzealous in interpreting that and the BBC was a bit slow to respond.

The primary benefit of "Perl on Rails" has been the internal momentum to ensure this doesn't happen again. You can read a bit more about this at an O'Reilly blog post I made about the Perl on Rails mess.