[Catalyst] Catalyst & Bricolage Integration

[Perrin Harkins]

Tobias Kremer wrote:
> Has anyone here already tried to get those two things together or has done
> something similar? Or is this just a stupid idea?

We do something similar with the Krang CMS publishing content served by 
CGI::Application.  We have it write out templates and metadata for each 
application ("story" in Krang terminology) in separate directories and 
have apache identify which requests mod_perl should handle based on the 
file name.  This means we can let people publish an app to any location 
in their URL space with no changes to our config or backend.

The metadata we use is in the form of a CGI::Application stub script, 
and it tells the app which controller class to run for this request and 
specific settings like which fields on the form are required.

To do this kind of thing with Catalyst, you might want to just publish 
little data files (XML or whatever) with your templates and set up your 
web server to pass those to Catalyst.  To get the same sort of setup 
where you can vary the actual controller by data published from your CMS 
(e.g. message board here, newsletter signup here, etc.), you'd need to 
make a minimal meta-controller to read the XML file and then forward the 
request to the controller that you want to handle it.  Then you just set 
up your web server to send all requests for *.xml (or *.app or whatever 
you like) to your meta-controller.

- Perrin