Dan Brook

Today saw the first developer release of Gitalist - a modern git web viewer. Many thanks to Tom and Zac for getting it out the door.

Gitalist started out as an attempt to port gitweb to Catalyst but ended up as a new piece of software with gitweb URL compatiblity (and stuck with its original transitional name). This first developer release should see a fully functioning Catalyst app with full gitweb URL backwards compatibility and no major bugs, although there are plenty of rough edges.

As it stands the app itself is quite simple internally and externally thanks, in no small part, to Zac and Tom's marvellous work on the model. They stripped it down from a single monolithic Model class and transformed it into a sane and sensible set of domain objects. As for the external bits the frontend consists of HTML5 and CSS (with JavaScript knobs and whistles to come) which is all brought to you by Template Toolkit.

Being a developer release there's clearly much work to do. Zac has plans on ripping out the domain objects and having them in a separate module. I'm slowing redesigning away from the original gitweb inspired layout, hoping to totally reimplement the syntax highlighting and providing JSON for as many views as possible. I also have very general ideas about making the blob (e.g the file view) pluggable in some fashion such that Gitalist can provide arbitrary views of files e.g POD view. And of course more git-related functionality like what work has been done on a topic branch, history graphs for commits and feeds for everything.

Once more many thanks to Tom and Zac for all their awesome work and help. If you're attending LPW this year be sure to check out Zac's talk on Gitalist or if you're generally interested in the project drop by #gitalist on irc.perl.org or fork it on GitHub where any issues can also be logged.