Re: Maypole and I - Tales from the Frontier of a Relationship

[johnnywang]

Thanks, great information. I've been using Struts for quite sometime for several projects, always wanted to look into Maypole. Can someone with experience with both provide some comparison?

You explicitly said Apache1/mod_perl, is there any issue with Apache2/mod_perl2?

Thanks.

Updated: For example, Struts has a very strong presentation layer in the form of many jsp tag libs. Template Toolkit doesn't seem to have that. This is of course more a TT issue than Maypole. How about server side validation in Maypole? The weakness of Struts is that it doesn't really do much about the model layer, it seems Maypole does more with Class:DBI.

[Corion]

Yes, there is an issue with Apache2/mod_perl2, mainly that it doesn't work. Maypole works with Apache2 as CGI (Maypole::CGI), and eric256 mentioned much pain to get it to play nice with Apache2/mod_perl2. The main problem is that Maypole relies on Apache::Request, which is, I hear, not supported anymore under mod_perl2.

[sri]

Just to clear this, Apache::Request has been ported to Apache2/mod_perl2.
And the development version of Maypole already includes native Apache2/mod_perl2 support (Apache2::MVC)! ;)

[Corion]

Maypole uses CGI::Untaint for all its validation, and it is pretty strong on that side. I switched Taint protection on fairly late in the process, and did not need to change any line of code in either Maypole or my additional code, as Maypole educates the user in a fairly controlled manner to always properly untaint the data.

Personally, I'm no big fan of TT, as it allows to do far too much in the custom language instead of pushing complex things back to the Model layer. I prefer the Petal approach of things, where simple things, such as method calls are possible, and everything harder must be implemented in Perl code in the relevant class.

[CountZero]

I searched far and wide, read all I could find on the subject, even tried some of the recipes which were offered to let Maypole play nicely with Apache2/mod_perl, but I did not succeed. It is no use installing Apache2 and then restrict yourself to only use Maypole in CGI-mode. As it is a rather heavy application (stacking Maypole, Template Toolkit and Class::DBI and compiling all this for every CGI-request) it would benefit very much from mod_perl, but now it defeats itself.

There is a compatibility layer in mod_perl for the easy transfer from Apache1 to Apache2 but somehow I could not get it to work on Maypole. And as the error-messaging system is less than perfect, it I could not find a solution and gave up on it.

Pity, it seemed an interesting project.