Rapid Web Application Development in Perl

Today we have many web frameworks for developing web applications such as CodeIgniter, Ruby on Rails, Django and, of course, Catalyst. However, it is often desirable to have features such as the ability to generate database table schemas and out-of-the-box web UIs, without the constraints of a web framework. Thus, in this talk, we will demonstrate how typical database-driven web applications can be quickly built with minimal effort using the following Perl modules:

Rose-DBx-Object-Builder

Generates database table schemas from simple, succinct sentences. It alleviates the need to specify the data type for every table column and simplifies the tedious work of setting up common table relationships.

Rose-DBx-Object-Renderer

Generates Web UI for Rose::DB::Object, a Perl ORM module. Essentially, the module extends Rose::DB::Object with a set of self-contained methods for rendering forms, tables, menus and charts. It encapsulates many web conventions in the generated UIs as default behaviours.

These modules originated from PhD research projects and have been adopted for commercial development by organisations including University of Western Sydney and SiteSuite Australia. The talk will also demonstrate how these modules can be integrated with the CGI::Application web framework.