January 2015 Archives

How OBVIOUS things get missed to be done... or seen...

Happy New Year!..

Oh my bad! I missed to post here that I made a Grant proposal.

It often happens. It obviously happens so obviously often during the last 15-20 years that the other day a guy (C# programmer) on Facebook commented: "CMS in Perl?!? "It will scale with your business" hahahaha". We obviously miss to say explicitly obvious things.

Yes, he does not know this is just a "Piece of cake" for us. Yes, it is so much "Piece of of cake" that almost nobody in the Perl community bothers to do it. Yeah, we have CPAN, we have CPANTESTERS, We have tied variables that some languages find very cool and trendy, and we even find them old fashioned, We are modern, we have Mo /o /se, ORMs and all the stuff, BUT "We suck at marketing".

OK, let us stop saying this and start doing things, the obvious things. Like writing a book for doomies, like a CMS (just using the acronym), as PHP community does. Like many CMSs, so many that when searching the web one can find more written in Perl than in ... some other languages.

I know we have enterprise-grade systems. I know. Everyone of us knows what he/she is doing at work what tremendous amounts of data Perl is capable to process. How it scales, how even amazingly stupid Perl code amazingly works, etc., etc...

Now, I am trying to mitigate/fix/repair (what's the word in English?) my mistake - the fact that I forgot to post here. There are five days or something left for the community to comment, let us help the Grants Committee to vote.

BEAUTIFUL. We should make the things to look beautiful. Why do we ignore so often this? Is there anyone who feels he is better designer than coder among us? Please come and help to make it beautiful. Go look over the web, steal ideas, inspiration... Suggest! I will do my best to find and choose one (why not two or more) default theme for the site area which does not suck. No, it must be beautiful. It should be so beautiful that... one decide to download Ado. (TODO: Write a tutorial about how to make/install themes in Ado) (WTF is this name? "Additional Day Off"? yes, no, see http://www.thefreedictionary.com/ado)

EASY. We must make it easy to install/deploy. So easy that any casual kid (one of those who call them self programmers after making his first site with Joomla or WordPress) can enjoy it, using his cheap shared hosting account, managed by cPanel.

PROFESSIONAL. We must keep it professional, keeping clear the path to growth. That is why Ado is based on Mojolicious. That is why it can be split in modules, which can be installed from CPAN, automatically get test reports from http://www.cpantesters.org/. Setting and imposing rules. That is why we used Perl::Critic (and may be soon could switch to Perl::Lint) while developing.

TINY. We should keep it tiny -- just a wrapper -- and later use whatever we decide is helping us from CPAN to integrate trough our plugins.

I could as well base it on Dancer if several years a go I had chosen Dancer. You may choose Dancer for your simple-to-use-install-and-extend web-framework with-user-interface. Do it!

I applied for the grant to force my self to do it. With whatever help and deadly constructive criticism from you - the more the better.

About Krasimir Berov

user-pic Perl and Bulgarian are my native languages. I naturally read and understand most Slavic languages like Russian, Serbian and recently Czech... as well as I write JavaScript, HTML, CSS, SQL...