OpenBSD Journal

Catalyst - a powerful, perl-based webframework - ported to OpenBSD

Contributed by deanna on from the pkg_delete-cpan dept.

Simon Dassow writes:

We started using Catalyst - a Perl based Webframework - a while ago; some of you might have seen my first try at porting this.

As OpenBSD is our rock solid base we built our system on i had to do something. One option might have been just to use the CPAN shell, but that would clutter with installed packages or require a local, user-based install, nothing really statisfying. With my porting experience this looked quite easy, but the actual work was more time intensive than expected in respect to every detail. The hardest thing was to get all dependencies right, finding the responsible modules, port them too if necessary and finally regress-test all of it.

I finally came up with a bunch of new ports that are now in production for a while, making our customers happy.

Though i had no way and/or time yet to contribute my efforts back and share them with you. Recently the catalyst devs came to help offering me commit bits so i can integrate my work into their tree available to everyone. As of writing this article i've already commited 37 new ports, providing Catalyst with a handful of plugins. There are still ports in the queue, so expect a rather complete collection of software.

Just to name a few essential module names in the set:

  • Catalyst::Runtime
  • Catalyst::Devel
  • Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication
  • Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication::Store::File
  • Catalyst::Plugin::Authentication::Store::DBIC
  • Catalyst::Plugin::Authorization::ACL
  • Catalyst::Plugin::Authorization::Roles
  • ...
  • and more to come

I'd like to invite all administrators and developers working with web based systems and OpenBSD to test, comment and enjoy the new possibilities :-)

To find out more about the Catalyst project visit:
http://www.catalystframework.org/

The URL to the Catalyst Subversion repository is at:
http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/Catalyst/trunk/packaging/openbsd

Read my announcement to ports@ in the archives:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-ports&m=116242005519670&w=2

Test reports, comments and suggestions are welcome.

With kind regards
Simon

Simon's homepage is here, and he may be contacted via email at: janus@errornet.de

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By Jim (198.62.124.245) on

    Someone needs to add a Puffy logo to the Catalyst home page now.

    Comments
    1. By Simon Dassow (85.176.218.84) janus () errornet ! de on http://janus.errornet.de

      > Someone needs to add a Puffy logo to the Catalyst home page now.

      I've already told them, though here's my own version of it so i had an actual argument :-).

      Regards,
      Simon

  2. By Anonymous Coward (71.98.179.243) on

    Thanks for the port!

    BTW, has anyone come up with a "trick" to make ports/packages and the oldschool CPAN method play nice with each other? When you install ports/packages, they don't check to see if you already installed any dependencies via cpan (after all anything you install that way exists outside of the package system). And when you install stuff with cpan, it doesn't know about any ports/packages that might be available (but currently uninstalled) and thus doesn't try to build/fetch those by preference.

    Comments
    1. By Marc Espie (163.5.254.20) espie@openbsd.org on

      > Thanks for the port!
      >
      > BTW, has anyone come up with a "trick" to make ports/packages and the oldschool CPAN method play nice with each other? When you install ports/packages, they don't check to see if you already installed any dependencies via cpan (after all anything you install that way exists outside of the package system). And when you install stuff with cpan, it doesn't know about any ports/packages that might be available (but currently uninstalled) and thus doesn't try to build/fetch those by preference.

      In general, the old CPAN stuff has ways less dependency tracking than
      ports... The new `build.pl' stuff is slightly better, but it often
      ends up painfully having to track down dependencies by hand.

      Plus, CPAN does not really distinguish between build/run dependencies.

      I'll have to admit, each time I've needed stuff from CPAN, I've ended
      up porting it...

  3. By Anonymous Coward (69.28.228.76) on

    Ok, I'm interested. I am so trying this out once I get 4.0 installed.

  4. By Sean Comeau (216.19.182.184) scomeau <at> obscurity <dot> org on

    damn, i already completely ported this months ago. it has loads of depends..

    do you still need any more of it done?

    Comments
    1. By Simon Dassow (213.128.132.194) janus () errornet ! de on http://janus.errornet.de

      > damn, i already completely ported this months ago. it has loads of depends..
      >
      > do you still need any more of it done?

      As there're a lot of plugins and other useful stuff, sure :-).
      I'll try to import the remaining ports this weekend for easier synchronization
      with your and/or other peoples work.

      Regards,
      Simon

      Comments
      1. By Sean Comeau (216.19.182.184) on

        > > damn, i already completely ported this months ago. it has loads of depends..
        > >
        > > do you still need any more of it done?
        >
        > As there're a lot of plugins and other useful stuff, sure :-).
        > I'll try to import the remaining ports this weekend for easier synchronization
        > with your and/or other peoples work.
        >
        > Regards,
        > Simon

        Ok, here's a tarball of a mystuff directory..

        http://secwest.com/catalyst-scomeau-mystuff.tar.gz

        i had good intentions about getting this put into openbsd ports but i forgot about it while i was waiting for someone to update god knows what perl module that i depend on a higher version of.

        I use this to create working apache2+modperl+catalyst sites

        kudos to you for getting catalyst into the ports tree.

  5. By Marc Espie (213.41.185.88) espie@openbsd.org on

    In case some of you people haven't noticed yet,
    I've started the long process of importing Simon and Sean
    respective works into our ports tree.

    This means a lot of new perl modules. Right now, we have a basis
    of usable catalyst stuff, and I expect to finish today.

    As usual, it looks a bit like we're going to import the whole of
    CPAN inside the ports tree.

    Beyond catalyst, one nice side-effect of such endeavors is that it
    becomes much easier to integrate further perl applications into
    OpenBSD, as most of the bases are already there !

    Comments
    1. By pyr (193.252.148.11) on


      > As usual, it looks a bit like we're going to import the whole of
      > CPAN inside the ports tree.
      >
      > Beyond catalyst, one nice side-effect of such endeavors is that it
      > becomes much easier to integrate further perl applications into
      > OpenBSD, as most of the bases are already there !

      At least it saves us the headache of choosing a scripting language.

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