Maypole 2.11 review

Maypole is a Perl framework for MVC-oriented web applications, similar to Jakarta's Struts

License: Perl Artistic License File size: 143K Developer: Aaron Trevena

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Maypole is a Perl framework for MVC-oriented web applications, similar to Jakarta's Struts. Maypole is designed to minimize coding requirements for creating simple web interfaces to databases, while remaining flexible enough to support enterprise web applications.

What does that mean?
Many web applications follow the same kind of flow of operation in response to a request from a user, they mess about with a database, and present the results of that messing about back to the user through some templating system.

For instance, searching a company's product catalogue will take a query from the remote web client, search the database for the rows matching that query, and format the rows as a list for display on a page.

This set-up is sometimes called "MVC", after the famous Smalltalk-80 Model-View-Controller paradigm. For our concerns, this means that the interaction with the user, (the controller element) the actions required at the database, (the model element) and the presentation of data (the view elements) are all neatly compartmentalised.

Maypole provides a generic way of handling that compartmentalisation. It provides the top-level code which examines the user's request, fires off the relevant method in the model, collates the data, asks the view class to format it up and sends it back to the user. * As well as this, some common Perl modules, such as Apache, Class::DBI and Template, already perform important parts required for model, view or controller operation, so Maypole provides wrapper classes to help them fit into the framework.

What's New in This Release:
Significant internal workflow refactoring and documentation was done.
Major enhancements were made to form generation and handling.
Additions were made to the API for handling redirection, sub requests, etc.
More examples, documentation, and tests were added.
Error reporting and debugging were improved.
Many bugs were fixed.