[Catalyst] Gitalist arrives on CPAN

[Dan Brook]

Reposted from http://blogs.perl.org/users/dan_brook/2009/11/introducing-gitalist.html

Today saw the first developer release of Gitalist - a modern git web
viewer[1]. Many thanks to Tom Doran and Zac Stevens for getting it out
the door.

Gitalist started out as an attempt to port gitweb to Catalyst but ended
up as a new piece of software with gitweb URL compatiblity (and stuck with
its original transitional name[2]). This first developer release should see a
fully functioning Catalyst app with full gitweb URL backwards compatibility
and no major bugs, although there are plenty of rough edges.

As it stands the app itself is quite simple internally and externally thanks,
in no small part, to Zac and Tom's marvellous work on the model. They
stripped it down from a single monolithic Model class and transformed it
into a sane and sensible set of domain objects. As for the external bits
the frontend consists of HTML5 and CSS (with JavaScript knobs and whistles
to come) which is all brought to you by Template Toolkit.

Being a developer release there's clearly much work to do. Zac has plans on
ripping out the domain objects and having them in a separate module. I'm
slowing redesigning[3] away from the original gitweb inspired layout,
hoping to totally reimplement the syntax highlighting and providing JSON
for as many views as possible. I also have very general ideas about making
the blob (e.g the file view) pluggable in some fashion such that Gitalist
can provide arbitrary views of files e.g POD view. And of course more
git-related functionality like what work has been done on a topic branch,
history graphs for commits and feeds for everything.

Once more many thanks to Tom and Zac for all their awesome work and help. If
you're attending LPW this year be sure to check out Zac's talk[4] on
Gitalist or if you're generally interested in the project drop by #gitalist
on irc.perl.org or fork it on GitHub[5] where any issues can also be logged.

Cheers,
Dan Brook aka broquaint

[1] http://search.cpan.org/~zstevens/Gitalist-0.000000_01/
[2] http://lists.scsys.co.uk/pipermail/catalyst/2009-August/023403.html
[3] http://github.com/broquaint/Gitalist/tree/frontend-tweaks
[4] http://conferences.yapceurope.org/lpw2009/talk/2446
[5] http://github.com/broquaint/Gitalist