{"id":1157,"date":"2004-05-02T11:15:44","date_gmt":"2004-05-02T20:15:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/?p=1157"},"modified":"2013-11-11T20:56:17","modified_gmt":"2013-11-12T01:56:17","slug":"20040502-0-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/risacher.org\/jfdi\/2004\/05\/20040502-0-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Perl web engine (revisited)"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

At work we have a product called eRoom<\/a>, which is a collaboration tool\/knowledge management system. It’s quite slick, in my opinion. <\/p>\n

As an open source guy, I can’t help looking at things and saying "hey, I bet you could do this as free software." And as mentioned elsewhere in my blog, I have this ongoing interest in building a web engine in perl. Why a web engine, of all possible projects? Well, it’s an enabling technology for lots of other projects. Why perl, of all programming languages? Well, I just like it.<\/p>\n

So what’s wrong with the zillion existing web engines, many of which are already in perl? None of the ones I’ve played with are particularly satisfying.<\/p>\n

There’s a few projects pending that could use a web engine to run on. One of these days I intend to make a better version of Reviews Of This Book<\/a>. And I built a prototype a webmail engine, but I never finished it. I promised my wife I’d build a web-based playlist editor for my mp3 archive<\/a>, which is tied into her hi-fi rig. And my blog <\/a>itself is not finished, in terms of the code behind it; it should have images and discussion forums and whatnot. Megan’s web site<\/a> is hand coded currently, and could really use some automation. There are probably some additional half-finished or half-conceived projects waiting in the wings, that I’ve forgotten about.<\/p>\n

I’m somewhat inspired by Quixote<\/a>, which seems to focus on web development more as programming than publishing. That is to say, I’m looking for a framework where I can build software applications that happen to use HTTP and HTML as the user interface, rather than writing web content that happens to have some dynamic elements.<\/p>\n

The biggest roadblock, of course, continues to be my lack of free time. I do have full-time employment, and also have a wife and 6 month old daughter, all of which seem to take a fair amount of time to maintain. The easiest thing I could do to free up some time is to allocate some of the hours when I’m at work, and consider any such time as self-directed training, which would not be far from the truth. As a computer professional, most of the skills that I have are largely self-taught, and many are a direct result of working with free software. (usually both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer)<\/body><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"