kaare

Now that I've put Djet into production, I recon it's time I at least told about it.

Djet is a Node Based Content Management System. It's a rather advanced one, using features from modern Perl and PostgreSQL. It's meant to be used behind some kind of frontend server, e.g. Nginx, or at least a Web Cache like Varnish.

Being Node Based means that every end point and every waypoint in the system is a node in the database. A node is connected to its parent node (except the root node), and every node is also associated with some data.

The data is defined by a basetype that decides what to do when someone requests that specific path pointing to that specific datanode.

Djet Components

Some people seem to believe that all database systems are created equal. They're not. People deceive themselves into thinking of DBMS'es as pure datastores. PostgreSQL adds some very advanced features, of which I currently use the support for JSON, triggers, and Full-Text Search. Plus an extension to find the node using the request path, and probably more that I forgot at this moment.

Djet is running on "raw" PSGI, a wonderfully simple interface. A big part of what Djet does is to find the matching node, and as such the "route" in Mojo- and Dancer-land, so
any higher level framework wouldn't add anything in that direction.

With PSGI there's access to all the wonderful middleware that's already written.

Apart from Moose, perhaps the most important Perl piece of Djet is Web::Machine At some point during a refactor, I realized that I needed help to do REST in a proper fashion. This somewhat underdocumented module applies pure magic to the request to decide what to return. Well, perhaps not magic, but taking care of all the small twists and turns coming from the various headers is no small task. Web::Machine does just that.

Djet Right Now

Djet is ready to use - I use it! But having said that, it is still under heavy development and being refactored on a regular basis. I _think_ that the major parts are where they should be now, but some parts feel a bit "weak", underdeveloped, or just a bit wrong.

I have loads of ideas for Djet features, including a blog, a discussion system, and some way to get an overview of my projects. First, though, is a webshop and some kind of payment integration.

Djet is currently not on CPAN. I haven't figured out how to make sure that the required software is installed, and skip the tests if e.g. PostgreSQL is not up to the minimum release (soon to be 9.4). It will probably be released there as well, but for now, the place to find it is https://github.com/kaare/Djet.