[Epo-ec-advisors] Some thoughts on areas to address in the EC

[mike at altrion.org]

Partly thinking aloud here - my back's broad, so feel free to shoot me
down...

First off: XML

The main problem I see here for the core is it's a massive problem space
with multiple solutions, as a quick CPAN search reveals. I think perhaps
our first step needs to be to try and analyze the problem space into
categories of solution (parse vs generate, straight mapping to/from a data
structure vs XPath-based vs tree walking), and start with a document
that's a guide to best practices for each as we see them. Thoughts?

Next: Packaging

Close to my heart, this one, as my current project is going to require me
to hand over an installable Perl 'package' on potentially multiple OS's to
largely indifferent siteops for installation. It seems to me the main two
likely candidates (ignoring per-OS packaging) are either PAR or something
clever involving local::lib. PAR handles cross-platform packaging, it just
never seems to have got the leverage and momentum, which is a shame when
you consider the likes of .jar/.war for Java, and .egg for Python.

Finally, Messaging...

By which I mean XMPP, AQMP, Stonk, Amazon SQS and other ways of passing
messages between components of an enterprize app. There are modules for
most of the above, in various states of completion, several of which need
some love. On top of that, I'm working on MQI (Message Queue Interface),
which is intended to be DBI for messaging with a standard API via a
factory class and MQD (driver) layers on top of each protocol. Thoughts?
Does that sound like a good way forward?