Good advice for both building a house and performing a database update.

Every time I set up a DBIx::Class schema for a project, I find myself re-implementing the same pattern. While DBIC is one of the great things about modern Perl, it requires a lot of typing. Whenever I want to grab some stuff from a table, it's

my @records = $schema->resultset( 'CamelCasedClassName' )->search( ... );

Today, I used DBIx::Class::Schema::Loader to auto-generate a schema for a fun little 182-table database. I ended up with modules with names like MyApp::DBIC::Result::XStreamQueryParentArticle and MyApp::DBIC::Result::ArticleElementContent and so forth. Very useful, but what painful nomenclature.

So I ended up doing the same little hack that I always do, but improved upon it a bit this time, and have finally arrived at a solution that I really like.

The Common Gateway Interface was revolutionary. It gave us, for the first time, an extremely simple way to provide dynamic content via HTTP. It was one of a combination of technologies that led to the explosive growth of the Web. For anyone writing an application that runs once per HTTP request, there is no other practical option. And for such applications, CGI is almost always adequate.

But modern web applications typically run in persistent environments. For anything with more than a small trickle of traffic, we don't want the overhead of launching a new process for every hit. Even in low-traffic environments, the startup costs involved with using modern Perl frameworks like Moose and DBIx::Class can make non-persistent applications prohibitive.

We have things like mod_perl and FastCGI for easily creating persistent applications. But these applications are generally built upon emulating aspects of the stateless, non-persistent CGI protocol within a persistent environment. Even pure mod_perl applications typically receive much of their input via environment variables specified in the CGI standard, often by instantiating CGI.pm or one of its clones.

This model is fundamentally broken. Read on for my list of reasons why CGI should not be used in persistent applications.