6 Jul 2004 chromatic   » (Master)

The Hacks of July:

This is the last day of a three-day weekend. It's always nice when a federal holiday falls on a weekend, as enlightened employers tend to make the Monday or Friday a holiday to make up for things. In one sense, I really should be finishing the book before OSCON, but in another sense I'll be a better editor having taken several days off to rest and recuperate.

Instead of working on the book, I did some hacking. The more I use Maypole, the more I like it. Part of the benefit is familiarity. It's fairly easy to do simple things, but difficult things aren't that difficult when you understand how things work.

For example, I'm having great success with my article manager database. It's even more practical now that I added an alternate view template that fills in a contract for the author. Filling in the fields manually isn't time-consuming, but it surely is tedious. Now it's just a click away.

Of course, I don't particularly want to run a web server loaded with little db-backed applications all of the time; I'd rather launch a program when I need it, fiddle around a little bit, and close it when I'm done. That's doubly-true when I'm on the go with my laptop.

That was originally the theory behind Jellybean, anyhow. I'm easily distracted though and had several other projects demand my attention. Still, the basic idea is solid and the program works.

For kicks, I wrote Jellybean::Container::Maypole to run Maypole apps under Jellybean. Maypole's installer doesn't quite like this, as it still assumes you're using Apache and mod_perl. It works, though, so I can run article_manager to launch a dedicated web server and a new tab in my browser and go about my business. Add in SQLite to make something really powerful.

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