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Things have changed way too much in the bussines logic for our Flex 3 customer extranet application, so I have received the permision to make a fresh start... with low date pressure (I know, you envy me...). Instead choosing the obvious Flex 4 path, it seems that Perl/Catalyst fits very, very well in this brand new scenary, but I don´t want to lose some goodies:

We have just ONE set of .swf modules, so all clients load the same actual files in a shared path.

  • They are Virtual Hosts.
  • Each domain directory has a index.php. It loads a personalization file with passwords AND the "real" shared index.php that loads the shared .swf.
  • No crossdomain problems because the .swf thinks that its in the true domain, thanks to the Apache virtual link.
  • All personalization inside the .swf (bussines data and visual prefs) are loaded dinamically from preferences in a database

It seems that I can do the same with Catalyst, isn´t it? Even easier, because I can make the perl app to respond "globally" to the same arguments in different vhosts, so everything can be decide at runtime

But the great advantage of Flex is that I have all the logic and preferences already loaded in the client, so the work in the server and the data transference is really, really low. The only data that travels is pure bussines data. No preferences, no pages, no nothing. And the app always know WHO the client is, so the queries are really, really clean.

So here are my two questions:

  • Is the Persistence in Perl/Catalyst a way to manage something similar?

  • I have read a lot of posts, here and there, about unclosed processes and threads, even cron programmed restarting of the server... as a "solution", and similar performance problems.

    • Must I manage such things to have a stable server?

    It sounds ike a time bomb, and we are now very, very proud of our server perceived performance with a litle investment.

Thank you in advance

Nacho B
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1 Answers1

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The nice thing about Catalyst is that it is very easy to plug all sorts of nice things from CPAN into your application. You need Authentication/Authorization, Session management, database handling, PDF generation, Excel parsing....? If you can think of it, someone on CPAN has probably done it already and published it for the world to use.

It is not exactly clear to me what you want the server to do. If it's just providing data to your SWF application through JSON or something similar, Perl Dancer (http://perldancer.org/) might also be interesting to look at, it's like Catalyst on a diet. Both Catalyst and Dancer have built in PSGI support allowing you to run it in any way you like.

Myself, I have just recently finished a project for ABN AMRO Bank Luxembourg in which I used Catalyst as the backend solution for an ExtJS application. The application is run under FastCGI and is extremely robust and stable. i don't know where you heard that Catalyst processes are leaky and need to be restarted, but that's just nonsense. Of course, if you program leaks yourself you might get yourself in problems, but the framework itself is very stable. Also, because of using Catalyst I was able to develop a very complex application is a very short time. I don't know how I could have managed it without Catalyst.

Good luck with you project Rob

Rob Boerman
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