The Bull Og

I recently started a 6-week RoR bootcamp to fill in gaps as I promised myself I would do with a new framework (after building and maintaining a web app with Catalyst over two years.)

As you may know, Yahoo! is primarily a PHP shop, but there’s a lot of Perl being used for infrastructure, especially for monitoring. Amongst so many talented Perl developers, I opted to use a framework in order to focus on bringing value at a higher level. With Catalyst (which was new for me,) I read up on the framework as best I could (web/IRC/lists) given the other (Yahoo!-specific) technologies I was learning at the time along with the other responsibilities (product management, project management) I was juggling.

While working with Catalyst, I was burned more than once by assumptions and conventions of the framework I had not had time to go in depth on (they say you use 20% of what you learn, but you never know which 20%, do you?) That whole experience reinforced the notion that you will never always know everything you need to know at exactly the moment you need to know it, even if you’re an experienced web developer.

One just needs to be open to change and growth.

And a little extra homework…

Having worked with Catalyst extensively before getting into RoR, I have to give props to Dan (who I know from work) for an intro screencast on what I regard as the best web framework for Perl:

If you have any problems viewing it, you can see the video at the following URL:

Intro to Catalyst, Part I

Last night, I attended a meetup on Catalyst and am happy to have come away with a few more tips and tricks. Always learning something new.

After reworking my code to use HTML::FormFu instead of the FormBuilder plugin (which didn’t wind up taking that long, actually,) I could not find a way for HTML::FormFu to do client-side validation. My paradigm of GETting or POSTing a form and then redirecting to serve back JSON was completely ruined.

In the end, I found a work-around to do additional server-side validation using FormBuilder. The built-in validation patterns of FormBuilder don’t serve my needs (I have to take some input, do a request against another web-service, and go from there.)

In these last two weeks, I’ve made a lot of progress in migrating a monolithic form into AJAXian formlets. I discovered FormBuilder and was ecstatic about the client- and server-side validation and that was the crux of the transition.

It was going smoothly; too smoothly as a matter of fact. I had a single controller to handle requests like ‘forms/FORM_ID’ and serve up the proper form (based on FORM_ID,) the controller was handling POST-backs and doing updates (based on FORM_ID,) and I was returning JSON to indicate success or failure. Everything was going great until I realized that I couldn’t get a hook into the server-side validation which I need to be more robust than just some pattern checking.

I had gone too far down the path of dynamic form generation to turn back and I was about to tear-up when I remembered having taking a look at HTML::FormFu a while back. Looking into the documentation, I found a potential solution to my problem of custom server-side validation. I only dreaded having to swap out FormBuilder for HTML::FormFu.

I’m glad to report that two hours into the endeavor, the conversion is going magnificently. I’m refactoring the “.fb” files as “.yml” files but aside from that, there’s not much change to my controller for handling forms. There are a couple of syntactical differences here and there but for the most part, it’s painless.