[cgiapp] REST tunneling in CGI::Application::Dispatch

[Timothy Appnel]

On Friday, May 20, 2011 at 6:32 PM, Ron Savage wrote:
> It's sad to hear you refer to that code as 'the mess'. 
Yes Ron it makes us sad too, but MT(OS) has code that is almost 10 years old and was developed by dozens of engineers with little continuity in a closed sourced environment under some impossible deadlines. 

That being said, MT/Melody does a lot and has proven to be pretty solid software with a significant latent user base. Our biggest issues are in moving it forward with poor documentation and hacks on top of hacks spaghetti code with breaks kept to a minimum.

We are dedicated to refactoring the code and rapidly moving it to where it should be. We are also resigned to this taking a lot of time and effort that we have to grin and bear it while that happens. Melody's community by proxy of MT is that most are not very technical so there are precious few Perl coding resource contributing at this point. (hint. hint.)
> I often wonder where Melody is heading. 
> 

Well I could fill your ear on that, but I'd bore everyone to death here. Here are a few summary points in regards to its architecture:

* Replace the systems cgi-app-like framework with the real thing, CGI::Application. There were some incompatibilities with cgi-app that MarkStos identified for us. We deprecated those in 1.0 and have inserted suitable warnings and docs. In a version or two we will make the break and will be free to implement CA.
* More REST (hence CAD) to support an every increasing amount of jQuery powered AJAX interactions in the UI.
* Replace "proprietary" subsystems and frameworks with common CPAN packages when ever possible.
* Any of the above without a suitable CPAN replacement should be refactored in to its own distro and put in to CPAN.
* Move to PSGI/Plack

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have any additional questions or comments about Melody.

<tim/>

--
Timothy Appnel
Principal, The Appnel Group, http://appnel.com/
Director, Open Melody Software Group, http://openmelody.org