[cgiapp] Internationalization with Locale::Maketext

[Jerry Kaidor]

Jani-Hur wrote

> I'm new to web programming. Thanks to economical turmoil I've plenty of
> free time

*** I've been meaning to write an intro post myself.  Like in the AA
meetings:

   "My name is Jerry Kaidor, and I'm a programmer..."

   Well, I used to be a programmer.  Did it for a living for 20 years. 
Mostly embedded systems, networking equipment, lots of C and assembler.

   In 2001 I saw the handwriting on the wall, and started buying apartment
buildings.   Now I do business as a landlord.  But it's hard to get out of
the programming habit.  I was sitting down one day laboriously doing my
tenant ledgers ( on paper! ) and said to myself - "gee, a computer could
do this really easily".

   I implemented my ledgers as a set of mysql tables.  Started learning
Perl, and implemented the user interface as a set of CGI scripts. 
Added code and database tables to track maintenance.   Also prospective
tenants - added code to create rental agreements and various notices. 
And ( as they say in the ads ) much, much more :).

   And I have much, much more that I still want to add.  But the whole
thing is getting a little complicated.  It's time to go back in and
reorganize things a bit for easier development.  The old "Code Tidy". 
Luckily, it has been reasonably well organized from the beginning.  The
HTML-creation code has always been separated from the database access
code.  It has been pretty easy to go back and put things in proper Perl
packages.

  I would like to ultimately wind up with an MVC organization.  But it
seems to be too much work to rebuild the whole thing from scratch as a
new project.   For now, I am using CGI::Application to strip out the
giant if-elsif statements for the CGI state machines.  It's a major
change.  So today's sub project is to get the whole mess under source
code control.  For a one-man project I don't need anything fancy, so
will just use CVS.

                        - Jerry Kaidor ( jerry at tr2.com )