[Catalyst] automatic CRUD (was: how to get started?)

[Carl Franks]

On 21/08/06, burninbruce at yahoo.com <burninbruce at yahoo.com> wrote:
> fireartist wrote:
> > Many modules, particularly DBI / DBD::SQLite, include C code which
> > needs to be compiled on the target machine.
>
> Ok, now I realize Catalyst isn't what I'm looking for.
>
> I need something more lightweight.  I'm doing this for fun in my
> spare time and wanting something I can host on a cheap web hosting
> provider that only supports perl/CGI/PHP and MySQL but doesn't
> allow compiling and installing my own C software.  Or if there's
> nothing that does what I want in perl or PHP, I could pop for a
> slightly more expensive hosting service that would support Python
> or Java or Ruby on Rails, but still not installing new C software.

You can get even very cheap webhosting with SSH included - if you
don't have SSH, then installing anything will be hard.
In my experience, there's very few hosting packages that don't support
C compilation.
Just log in and type `which cc` or `which gcc` to check whether
there's a C compiler.
If there is, then it's very much harder to install XS perl modules,
than it is pure-perl. Either way, you'll need to create your own
library folder, and set CPAN.pm to install there.
To make sure that any Module::Build based modules install properly,
first use CPAN.pm to install ExtUtils::CBuilder, and everything should
go smoothly.

> What I want should be simple: a utility written entirely in Perl
> or PHP that I'd run once to query the schema of an existing MySQL
> database, which would output a set of new scripts (also entirely
> in Perl or PHP) that would let a user perform basic web-based
> CRUD operations on the tables in the database, preferably using a
> nice, simple MVC design.  Then I could customize those scripts as
> needed.  Does such a utility exist?

I think you'll find very few module's authors avoid XS modules - in
which case it's up to you to check the dependencies.
If you search cpan, there are sometimes pure-perl variants of modules,
e.g. DBD::mysqlPP, DBD::PgPP

I recently installed Fedora Core 5, and was pleasantly surprised that
I just had to type

> sudo cpan
cpan> install ExtUtils::CBuilder
cpan> install Catalyst::Runtime
cpan> install Catalyst::Devel
cpan> install Task::Catalyst

and everything installed with no problems.

Carl