To refocus the current discussion somewhat, I'm going with HTML::Mason myself, for various reasons.
The first one is that I trust the perl people to do something sensible. They've got a lot of advanced frameworks that do work, and they understand something about security. The downside is the documentation: HTML::Mason does not have the greatest documentation in the world, you have to read the full manpage to make sense of some of it. And there are not that many advanced examples around that are actually usable. I tend to not like sites where everything lives in a database (and this is the case for a lot of mason examples). The second point is the DBI framework. There are some genuine gems in there. Including Proxy/ProxyServer, which can be a life saver in some situations. And sqlite, which is really nice for medium sized applications (and requires no extra password ! a big plus in my opinion). Compared to 'ruby on rails', I imported p5-HTML-Prototype this week-end. Yes, this is the same ajax framework, adapted to perl. The documentation says it's designed for Catalyst, but it does work correctly with Mason as well... I haven't yet really started doing useful stuff with it, but proof-of-concept pages do work. Catalyst itself might be another solution (a big large one). Not too fond of its design myself. I do not need true MVC designs for my web, and I don't care all that much about completely well-formed XHTML. There is some fledgeling Catalyst port somewhere on the list, it will probably go somewhere soon. The main issue with perl modules is that there are so many of them. Most of CPAN is trivial to port over to OpenBSD, but is it worth it ? Most of it probably isn't... Some further notes: the apache2 framework is still `less' interesting than what we have in apache1, IMO. They keep building and building, but some basic functionality appears not to be there. e.g., our apache + Mason performs internal redirects. The apache2 installation I've seen does not. I'm also not really happy about existing DBIx frameworks for Mason... there does not seem to be any. True maps of databases to OO seem to exist, but I'd like a simple MVC schema for databases rendering and modifications, and so far it seems like I need to write my own. In the end, with correctly designed applications, Mason + sqlite + prototype + DateTime goes real fast, and does more or less what I need it to do. I'll have to do some real benches of Apache::DBI. In my setup, it does not seem to speed anything up, plus it adds some interesting bugs. It's probably a bit more raw than I would like, but I don't mind all that much. I'd appreciate some pointers to some other HTML::Mason apps with source code, or `frameworks'. So far, I've seen RT and Bricolage, and that's about it.
