Open Melody, Homebrew, Catalyst/Mojo and Sinatra.

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I just wanted to quickly highlight some interesting projects I’ve come across lately…

Open Melody

Open Melody is a fork of the popular blogging [/social media] platform Moveable Type. Its aim is to be completely backward compatible with Moveable Type but to have a more democratic development style.

One of the benefits of the Moveable Type system is that all posts are “published” rather than dynamically generated, i.e. from the posts a whole set of static html pages are created which can be served rather than database intense dynamic pages.

They want to encourage as much community participation as possible and all the code is on github for anyone to jump right in.

If nothing else they have a lovely looking website and I wish them all the best and look forward to seeing what becomes of this.

Homebrew

I love my MacBook Pro and OS X, I really do but there are times I miss being able to issue “sudo aptitude install apache” or whatever. Admittedly Fink [currently down] has worked well for me but I definitely plan to try out Homebrew, which is a new package manager for OS X. It was written by a guy I started stalkingfollowing on twitter because he works at last.fm!

Catalyst and Mojo

Mojo is a modern web framework written in Perl with an aim of being easy to install and having limited/no(?) dependencies. I actually applied to Google Summer of Code with Mojo but that’s another story…

Over the last week or two I’ve been working with Mojo’s big brother Catalyst. Catalyst is the opposite of Mojo in the “easy to install/lack of dependencies” but the guys in IRC are very helpful and the power and flexibility of Catalyst is awesome! It’s not as quick as bashing up a site in Rails admittedly but I am looking forward to using it more and also the book [aff link] is meant to be great!

Sinatra

Sinatra is a very simple and lightweight web framework written in Ruby. I’ve used it because it seems better than static HTML because you can set up simple URL routing:


get '/' do
erb :index
end



get '/about' do
erb :about
end


and you can have partial templates for footers etc. So basically better than PHP for a simple site.

Related posts:

1. Using TheSchwartz (Job Queue) with Catalyst
2. Become a Perl rockstar… AKA Perl link dump
3. Tweetfactor – An experiment using Ruby, Sinatra, Twitter and Redis

Tagged as: frameworks, perl