[Catalyst] Questions If You Please

[James D Bearden]

Hello All, 

My definitive guide to Catalyst should arrive on my doorstep shortly,
but until then if somebody could answer a few questions for me it would
be greatly appreciated:

 1) I have tried a couple times to change from individual to digest for
    this mailing list without success. Does anybody have any suggestions
    for making this happen?
 2) I am evaluating catalyst to replace our current perl server written
    from scratch. By that I mean we wrote a lot of code in order to
    implement libraries that didn't exist on CPAN at the time.
    Our server code that is dedicated to talking to the client is a
    small subset of our total perl code. Therefore the "server" will be
    merely part of that greater code base, but the default catalyst
    structure seems to assume other code will fall underneath *it*. For
    example, with us the test scripts and static web content are checked
    into a separate spots, and a lot of our scripts expect stuff to be
    in a specific spot. My question is, how can I muck with the default
    catalyst directory structure? In other words, can I tweak 
    myapp.psgi or something to define the lib, root, and test
    directories to be named something else and be somewhere else? 
 3) Also, the automatic restart of the developer server is a great
    feature I plan to have to do without because I can't figure out how
    to modify myapp_server.pl to let it know where I will have moved all
    the various bits to. So unless somebody can tell me how to do that I
    plan on just using plackup or starman for development, and
    restarting manually. Which is what we are used to doing right now.
 4) Finally, our current system relies on a more or less stock SSL over
    TCP socket for secure transport. I already have the conversion from
    a TCP socket connection to stateless HTTP working with minimal
    impact to our current codebase, but not the SSL to HTTPS. I see
    there is a module to require a secure connection, but is there no
    module to actually provide the secure connection? In other words, to
    use HTTPS do I need to proxy through a web server because there is
    no way for something like starman to do that by itself? What is
    complicating matters is our client is a thick Java application, so
    if there is no way then I would rather just build in some sort of
    mechanism to disable HTTPS for development rather than set up a
    HTTPS capable development web server.

I also have a bajillion questions about deployment, but hopefully the
book will shed some light on that. In case you are wondering, I am
hoping to be able to use Catalyst because we plan to transition to a
light client, and using Catalyst would make that less painful.

-- 
James D. Bearden
(866) 773-3867
http://www.dvns.com
mailto://james@dvns.com
da Vinci Network Services
Doing the impossible is relatively easy.
Doing the infeasible is a sticky wicket.