bivio and mod_perl

["zt.zamosc.tpsa.pl" <kr...@zt.zamosc.tpsa.pl>]

Do many mod_perl programmers use bOP by bivio.biz  in their large projects?
Could you  share with your experience at working with it?
The documentation looks very very... promissing.


Chris

Re: bivio and mod_perl

[Rob Nagler <na...@bivio.biz>]

zt.zamosc.tpsa.pl writes:
> Do many mod_perl programmers use bOP by bivio.biz  in their large projects?

At least 3. :-) We have a few downloads, but I doubt anybody is using
it for anything serious besides us.  (Others, please correct me
if I'm wrong.)

> Could you  share with your experience at working with it?

What is unique to bOP, which also is its weakness, is that we exploit
Perl "to the max".  We avoid special syntaxes, such as XML, except for
input and output.  This means we get all the power of Perl in view
languages, acceptance tests, unit tests, etc.  This makes it hard for
anybody who is not a Perl application developer to build applications
in bOP, i.e. we function as designers and programmers--sometimes we
get help from graphic artists or writer.

> The documentation looks very very... promissing.

It works.  There is no "design documentation" for a variety of
reasons, so you have to be prepared to look at code and examples to
figure out how it works and how to use it.

bOP has been commercially deployed for years and evolves on demand,
e.g. the View language itself was only added relatively recently and
we just released our e-commerce component.

What we like is that we don't have to program very much to get a lot
done, but when we need to write ordinary Perl code, bOP helps us
instead of hindering us.

To me, there are two ways to use bOP: as an example or as a platform.
I think many people have looked at it, and rolled their own.
Infrastructure in mod_perl is *easy*.  It's the applications that are
the hard part (in any platform).  Any infrastructure has to match your
style or you have to be willing to adapt.  If you like learning or
already understand declarative programming, you may find bOP suits
your needs out of the box.

Rob