So, I'm about halfway through my first read of "The Definitive Guide to Catalyst", by Diment and Trout, and I have to say I'm very impressed with the Catalyst architecture, and can already see a very clean design for an EFS web-based application forming in my head.
One thing that become clear to me over the last few years is that no matter how good EFS is as an infrastructure product, as long as the interface is CLI only, it will fail to impress a very large subset of it's potential user community. We have always known that EFS needs a decent web GUI in order to take it to the next level. After watching other less productive developers (you know who you are, and you're probably not reading this mailing list anyway) this problem, and never seeing anything useful, I've decided that 2012 will be the year I finally learn to write web apps. Catalyst should make this relatively painless (until I have to debug some JavaScript, but that's not their fault). Now, I am bringing this up for two reason: (a) this is probably going to be the beginning of EFS 4, since I expect to completely throw away efsd, and replace it with the web server based process, and (b) I have heard repeated rumors (but never seen any designs, code, docs or anything) that the EFS 2 team (i.e everyone working on EFS but me) has been working on some JSON abstraction for the EFS database, and I don't want to completely invalidate that work. If this is true, and there HAS been some development effort on this front, please pipe up and let me know, before I make everything you've done obsolete. If not, then this would be a great opportunity to start discussing how an EFS web application should evolve. Right now, I'm focused on finally figuring out how to manage the per-project efsdeploy configs in a version control system, and then rewriting cpan2efs again (spent an evening with Dan Golden and came up with a better strategy for managing the metadata). I expect this to take up the next month or so, and then I am turning my attention to Catalyst. Just a heads up, so people know where this code is going.... _______________________________________________ EFS-dev mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.openefs.org/mailman/listinfo/efs-dev
