[Catalyst] Calling form plugin authors: these should not be plugins

Matt S Trout dbix-class at trout.me.uk
Mon Nov 20 10:19:42 GMT 2006


Another day, another stupid problem reported on #catalyst because  
somebody thought it was a good idea to write a form handler as a  
plugin (FormBuilder this time).

Form plugins do not need to interrupt the request cycle (like  
Authentication, Static::Simple, Session etc. do).

Form plugins do not need to communicate directly to the engine

Form plugins all seem to want $c->form and thus are a disaster for  
code re-use between applications (expect C::P::HTML::Widget, which  
wants $c->widget and as such is a reasonably self-contained disaster :)

There's no reason why these can't be controller base classes, action  
classes, whatever. They Do Not Belong As Plugins.

Please can the authors or current maintainers of at least -

C::P::FormValidator
C::P::FormValidator::Simple
C::P::FormBuilder
C::P::HTML::Widget

take a long hard look at their code, and if you can't find a reason  
this *has* to be a plugin, please make it something else. I have a  
feeling the first on that list is maintained by core; if that's so,  
I'll happily port it myself sometime in the next couple weeks to give  
people a guide to work to.

I intend to mark all these plugins deprecated by the master plugin  
documentation for the next major release unless somebody cares enough  
to argue otherwise.

-- 
Matt S Trout, Technical Director, Shadowcat Systems Ltd.
Offering custom development, consultancy and support contracts for  
Catalyst,
DBIx::Class and BAST. Contact mst (at) shadowcatsystems.co.uk for  
details.
+ Help us build a better perl ORM: http://dbix- 
class.shadowcatsystems.co.uk/ +





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