[Catalyst] Quick question on forward porting versus retaining existing code

[Joe Landman]

On 03/17/2011 04:27 PM, Andrew Rodland wrote:
> On Thursday, March 17, 2011 02:51:59 PM Joe Landman wrote:
>> Hi folks
>>
>>     We have a Catalyst app we've developed since about 2005 or so.  We
>> put it aside in late 2008, and haven't touched it until now.
>>
>>     I wanted to see if it would still work (as it turns out, we can reuse
>> this for a new project).
>>
>>     Before we get into this in depth, are there any pointers/blog
>> posts/articles about forward porting an application (this was
>> pre-Moose), or whether or not the app would work without forward porting?
>>
>>     Basically we don't want to have to redevelop everything we put into
>> that (login/authentication, views, etc.), and simply add to the existing
>> app with a limited set of changes to make it current would be ideal.
>>
>>     Thanks!
>>
>> Joe
>
> It's the intention of the Catalyst dev team that new releases don't break
> existing apps. The 5.7 to 5.8 transition broke that promise *slightly* more
> than most releases (mostly due to the C3 MRO), but a great many apps written
> for 5.7 will still run without any changes on 5.8, and of the remainder, 99%
> will only need very small changes. Rewriting your code to make explicit use of
> Moose is *not* required. Just deploy the app with the current version of
> Catalyst and current versions of any plugins it uses, and if there are any
> errors or warnings on startup, use them as guidance. If you run into a nut you
> can't crack, please feel free to come back for advice, but you should start
> out by just trying to run the app.

For laughs, I just tried it, and modulo some module updates, it appears 
to work.

Thanks folks, this is great!  Should speed our development quite a bit!

>
> Andrew


-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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Scalable Informatics Inc.
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