Hi!
My partner and I were assigned to design a unified way for the Technion to manage its seminars, a project which we will receive academic credit for. We spent some time designing and thinking about the project. Our supervisor told us that we are free to use whatever existing tools and technolgies we could find that could make our job easier. A previous post to this mailing-list revealed to us that a system that "did 90% of what we needed" existed and it was dubbed OpenACS. However, we decided against using it because it was based on Tcl, AOL-Server and MySQL (and we are not very familiar with Tcl or AOL-Server), and because it seemed like a well-integrated architecture, and we want to avoid depending on things like that. We decided to base our project on Perl, Apache, and either MySQL or PostgreSQL instead, possibly using code we write on our own. Based on a design we made, we came to the conclusion that modules that perform the enlisted tasks would greatly help us. If you can supply names and pointers of such implementations, we would really appreciate it. (I realize the important of RTFMing and STFWing. However, I am sending this E-mail to save me some problems of tweaking Google or Google Groups or the CPAN search with a zillion queries, which may or may not yield me what I want. Sorry, but nothing can replace a mailing-list for this.) 1. Meta-Data Database Access System MDDA is a name I invented for a concept which I know I did not orignally invent, yet I thought of independantly. What I want is to pass a generic class a Perl 5 data-structure that describes the query (tables, fields, relationships, filter constraints) and receive the data (or pass it - it can be a write query). The purpose is that many of the fields involved can later be changed (add/remove/modify) without breaking the code. I can hack ad-hoc solutions for what I need with some effort, but I'm looking for a pre-existing configuration. 2. Type Checking and Constraints System A bit related. I'm looking for a system to specify constraints on the data and perform type checking using pure data (not code or subroutine pointers) as a constraints specifier. The system should correspond to what SQL offers me, as I'm going to put the records in a database eventually. 3. A Calendar Weblet We are looking for a calendar web-let that would be flexible and extensible. It should preferably use Real URLs (e.g: http://seminars/cal/2002/05 ), but that's not critical because we can always modify it to do so ourselves. 4. Filtering Front-End A system that can construct SQL filters based on several Cartesian, interoperable constraints. Hacking something like that would probably not take too long, but we are looking for a pre-defined solution. 5. Form Management This should support preview and submit (and possibly always preview for the first time). Another critical feature is displaying the pre-entered (and incorrect) input on a new form and noting the errors next to their fields and with a summary at the top. A nice to have feature which is not critical is automatic generation of JavaScript sanity checks. Note: they would not replace sanity checks at the server, and should not make the form dependant on them. 6. HTTPS/SSL: We nead a password management based on SQL that can seemlessly work with HTTPS. We will store the password in an SQL table (possibly only their checksum) and we wish to authenticate against them. Does Apache::Auth::DBI gives us everything we need? 7. Relative URL Management: We need ways to construct optimal relative URLS. E.g: /hello/universe - /hello/world = ../universe. We wish to link our pages to a central CSS stylesheet, and not to depend on absolute URLS (i.e: /mysite/mydir...) at all. 8. DBI Extensions: Portably creating a new record with a unique ID and retrieving the new ID. (using sequences in PostgreSQL, automatic fields in MySQL or whatever) 9. Page Templating: We are looking for a good, flexible and secure way to generate pages on the fly using stubs for Perl code to correspond to a site generic look and feel. And preferablly it should be a system you had a positive experience working with. 10. HTML and Text Validation and Conversion We may need something to validate and check HTML, tidy it, convert it to text, convert text to HTML, etc. I'm sure countless such technologies exist (I wrote a few myself), but I would prefer a personal recommendation. -------------------- Thanks in advance, Shlomi Fish ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..." "Wait a second - is n a natural number?" ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
