On 09/03/2010 21:11, Chris Travers wrote:
Hi all; I have spent some time looking at Catalyst to see what would be required to make LedgerSMB run according to current development approaches (close to the db, etc) and the result isn't easy. Basically, at a minimum, the following would need to be ported:
Caveat I have only looked at Catalyst and not hacked in it...However, to a large extent you should be able to drop "code" into catalyst and use nothing more than the CGI handlers, plus the big blob of code which is sql-ledger? The conversion to MVC is simply something which is highly desirable, but we had this discussion in the past and there is no reason you need to use any fancy ORMs or even anything other than "thick controllers" if you really don't want anything else?
Also I'm not familiar with catalysts view rendering, but were I doing the views in rails (say) then not much would need to change to make it integrate the Latex stuff, I would just render the template to a file and stream the file. In rails I use some views which are stored in a database, some from flat files and some generated from a composition of templated templates which are composed hierarchically from other templates... I would be highly surprised to find that there is not at least the same level of flexibility to do the same in Catalyst?
Unless you are a rails genius it might not help much, but there is an interesting Admin Site generator called ActiveScaffold which is worth picking ideas from. They use an approach which builds templates from sub templates going down quite a few levels and making it very easy to override parts of the generic templates, customise the language, etc. The application is very different, but some of the basic ideas would translate very nicely and be useful
Good luck Ed W