Robert 'phaylon' Sedlacek: July 2009 Archives

When you ask someone in the community about the biggest advantage of using Perl 5, you most often get the answer “CPAN.” At least I have, and I have been agreeing with this point for a long time. Some even call perl a “platform to run CPAN on.” We, in the community itself, have little or no problem locating a module for a specific task that fits our needs. Either we already know a module, or we know a project and use what they use, or we are on a mailing list or IRC channel with people that we trust to give us a pointer. Even the fact that we know about specific tools is a big advantage.

To us, the diversity of CPAN is a clear win. We have no problems (but gain some huge possibilities) with CPAN holding old modules, modules that try to be complete, modules that try to be small, modules that try to be clever, and modules that try to be flexible side by side. We are happy to have the choice because we know how to make it.

But what’s a win here for us, is a big hurdle for newcomers and those that don’t have the time/resources to be part of the community. They have no idea about what to choose for which purposes.

I wanted to write a post giving some clues about where to look for modules, and how to decide which one suits your task for quite some time now. So, here it is.

So, it is still a bit of work to setup Reaction applications. The Tutorial walks you through it, but that’s still many lines of code and many places to introduce errors.

What I came up with last week is a module called ReactionX-Jumpstart, that comes with a reaction-jumpstart script that works similar to what Catalyst provides with its catalyst.pl.

It is nowhere near complete, it lacks many things and doesn’t even create the application’s scripts yet, but this is just a matter of time and decision making.

Now, let’s see what it can do.