Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason

Chapter 8. Building a Mason Site

This chapter covers, in detail, a full-fledged working web application. Our application is the Perl Apprenticeship site at http://apprentice.perl.org/. Back at O’Reilly’s 2001 Open Source Conference, Adam Turoff suggested that the Perl community needed a site where people who had project ideas, but either not enough time or not enough expertise, could hook up with other programmers who could supply the missing pieces.

An experienced developer with a really neat idea and not nearly enough time to do it can post a project idea and offer to mentor a less experienced developer in its implementation. Conversely, a less experienced developer with a really neat idea who isn’t quite sure how to go forward on it can look for a mentor to help him bring that idea to life.

This is a pretty basic database-backed web application, the kind of thing that Mason gets used for all the time. It didn’t require anything too terribly complicated, but it shows off a number of Mason’s features quite well, including how components can be used to isolate individual site elements, autohandlers and dhandlers, and a simple use of <%method> blocks.

One thing worth noting is that for database access we chose to use Alzabo, which is a project created and maintained by Dave Rolsky. Alzabo is a database-to-object mapper built on top of the DBI. It allows us to easily create Perl objects representing things in our database, like users or projects. We will not be going into detail on our ...