Jonathan Vanasco wrote:
>
> It was annoying to get my head around this. the 'magic' part of it
> holds true and makes it confusing.
>
> for the longest time, i would just print $var, ref $var and other stuff
> to STDERR to try and get my head around it
>
> I never quite did completely understand it, but doing the above trained
> me to code for it
well, it's actually not all that magical :)
the :method attribute is a core perl feature - it's how you mark a
subroutine as being a method. see
$ perldoc attributes
for more details there. now, since that subroutine is marked as being a
method deep within in the perl API, mod_perl can see that and do something
special with it.
hopefully you understand by now that mod_perl is really just a fancy
dispatching engine:
browser
-> calls apache
-> calls mod_perl
-> calls your perl subroutine
-> unwind
so, when mod_perl calls your Perl*Handler it can (essentially)
my $rc = My::PerlResponseHandler::handler();
or
my $rc = My::PerlResponseHandler->handler();
it does the former by default, but if it sees the :method attribute set on
the handler() subroutine it uses the latter syntax.
HTH
--Geoff
