I'm making rapid progress in getting OokOok to a stable programming scheme. I haven't made a lot of changes in its capabilities, though I did add the ability to archive themes and projects as Bagit files yesterday, I've been working on making the important stuff declarative. By hiding all the details behind a veneer of relationships, I can fiddle with how I manage those relationships without having to touch every relationship every time I make a change in the underlying schemas (and schemes).
For those used to an older style of Perl programming, this might come as a surprise. For those who have dealt with things like MooseX::Declare and CatalystX::Declare, you'll be shaking your head at my foolhardiness in jumping into making an OokOok:Declare that hides the details of how to construct certain types of classes.
Behind the scenes, OokOok consists of controllers, models, views, REST collections/resources, SQL result objects, a template engine, and tag libraries for the templates. Almost two hundred classes in all.
If I built all of these the usual Perl way, there'd be a lot of boilerplate code around. By moving to a declarative approach, I can isolate all the boilerplate in a few core meta-classes. When the boilerplate has to change, I only have to touch one place. Everything else comes along for the ride.
For the rest of this post, I want to walk through how I use some of these declarative constructions. I won't get into the scary details of how to make declarative constructions in Perl (at least, not in this post).
