Development
About The Author
Starting on a Commadore C64 in the mid-80's, Rob has been programming ever since, though thankfully the hardware has improved slightly.
After learning Basic, Visual Basic, Assembly, C, and C++, Rob eventually found himself needing to create a forum for a personal website; that's when he found Perl.
He's been developing in Perl for the past 10 years in various dev-manager roles. He has a few contributions on CPAN and works primarily with Plack and Catalyst, on a CentOS/MySQL stack.
He's always keen for his team(s) to understand where their applications are running, and what is going on outside the Perl-space they're familiar with.
This blog aims to cover the various technologies he's worked with over the years, and found useful to know about when working specifically on web-apps.
Want a Slow Website? Use InnoDB
I have many web-apps running online, and most are supported by a MySQL backend, with tables using the InnoDB engine.
InnoDB is great, it enforces data-integrity with foreign keys, not like MyISAM that doesn't give a damn.
URLs in Catalyst Apps
Google along with many other search engines has a habit of treating URLs differently if they end with a trailing-slash or not. How much this actually harms your SEO is questionable, but I prefer things consistent.
Modern Perl Development Environment
If you've ever had to deal with delays in getting CPAN modules installed on a dev server, or simply had issues with a new server build and can't get CPAN running at all, then it may be time to look into running a modern Perl development environment, enabling you to run a local development environment, with no outside hassle.
Cache for Performance
If your web-apps are ever dealing with large data-sets or complicated translations of data, caching with memcached may provide a clean and effective solution to improving performance. Caching is the act of remembering things for later use, usually complicated objects that take a long time to prepare, but are needed regularly.
Fundamentals of CGI
The Common Gateway Interface, or CGI, is an interface between a web server and any backend scripts or programs that perform a given task.
It's very easy to get-by without knowing the full details of how CGI physically works, but this can often lead to a lack of confidence when debugging website issues.