Wednesday, June 11, 2003

p5ee goodness: Openinteract 2.0 beta 1 has arrived OpenInteract 2 is in beta. Congratulations, Chris. I just finished an iis/fastcgi port of a mod_perl application that is screaming for OI-ization ... it was written and maintained by many different programmers during it's lifetime, some of whom apparently believed they could write a better templating module than the 10 or so on CPAN (just to give you an example of coding style and design choices). Rewriting to project to embrace OI would mean making a lot of best practices decisions in one fell swoop, and allow me to think more about coding, and less about architecture. Which is really what p5ee is all about. It would also provide me with some nice documentation to pass on to the next bloke stuck with maintaining the code, instead of requiring the week's worth of spelunking to figure out how everything works. Anyway, industrial strength refactoring was out of scope for my port project, but hopefully I'll get the time/budget for it soon. 11:16:44 AM      comment []  trackback []

Boston.pm meeting I went to the Boston.pm tech meeting last night, to hear a YAPC talk from Kevin Falcone on AxKit. AxKit seems like an appealling project, but I never really understood the architectural decision to transform XML files in real time. It always seemed like a task better suited to offline processing. Anyway, I overheard the Boston.com's software manager talk about their new CMS. They decided to migrate their home-brewed mod_perl scripts to Zope for the entire site. Bricolage was a candidate they considered, and would have required a lot less training for their perl-heads, but it didn't have the same level of support that Zope had. I asked if they used the perl integration that Zope Corporation built in, but they wanted to stay away from non-mainstream functionality. They found that whatever perl datafeed parsing jobs they wrote connected up to Zope via XML-RPC or WebDAV just fine. On the non-mainstream other hand, they addressed the Zope performance bugaboo by implementing the newly supported edge-side-includes in Squid. Edge Side Includes is an initiative originally from Akamai that allows you to define HTML caching on a page component basis. It allows proxy servers to cache the boilerplate parts of your web pages (images, navigation) and just request the dynamic parts of the page from back-end servers. I knew that the Squid/ESI work had started, but hadn't realized it had graduated out of the project's contrib section. I asked the dev manager Andrew if it was ready for prime time, and he said, "It better be, we're going live tomorrow." :-) 12:29:05 AM      comment []  trackback []