[Catalyst] [ANNOUNCE] Alien::Dojo v0.01

[Carl Franks]

Hi,

I'm the one responsible for HTML::Dojo!
I've kept quiet until Alien::Dojo made it onto cpan, so I could look
it over fully first.

On 22/05/06, Dominique Quatravaux <dom at idealx.com> wrote:

>    1. A::D doesn't depend on RMS' or anyone's opinion on OSS license
>       compatibility issues for being legal (as a CPAN package that is
>       - "compiled" RPM or deb packages would be another matter)

Dojo FAQ Licenses and legal questions
http://dojo.jot.com/FAQ#Licenses%20and%20legal%20questions

The licensing goals of the Dojo Foundation are straightforward:
    * Encourage adoption
    * Discourage political contention
    * Encourage collaboration and integration with other projects
    * Be transparent
http://dojotoolkit.org/docs/licensing.html

HTML::Dojo attributes copyright to the Dojo Foundation, and the bundle
of dojo files includes the Dojo license file.

>    2. A::D can automatically fetch the very last version of Dojo (it
>       can parse the http://dojotoolkit.org/ homepage), meaning that I
>       don't need to repackage for every new version of Dojo. Actually
>       one can even upgrade Dojo *in place* from under A::D's feet
>       using rm -rf and unzip and it will just work

I'm not sure I see this as a strength.
The dojo homepage went through a major re-design last week, and may do
so again at any time.
Alien::Dojo uses a regex to parse the homepage, to find the download
link. That would easily be broken if they, for example, added any any
other attribute between the "<a" and the "href=".

The actual HTML::Dojo can also be upgraded cleanly using CPAN.pm,
without having to "rm -rf" anything in your perl/site_lib directory.

HTML::Dojo also bundles all of the different Dojo "editions".
The ajax edition linked from the Dojo homepage is the most popular,
but there are a total of 12 editions available.

Also, with Alien::Dojo, once someone "rm -rf" their directory and
upgrades, there's no easy way of downgrading again if necessary;
whereas with HTML::Dojo, each previous full distribution will be still
available from the cpan.

Having to update HTML::Dojo each time Dojo is updated shouldn't be a
problem, as the svn repo contains a script that automatically rebuilds
the distribution from the latest downloads.

>    3. A::D is available on CPAN right now (well, real soon now)

HTML::Dojo has been on cpan since last monday, I think. I left off
uploading it until they released Dojo 0.3.0

>    6. Alien:: is arguably the correct namespace for Javascript bundles
>       (there is hardly any Perl in there)

That's fair enough. I named HTML::Dojo after HTML::Prototype which
similarly bundles the prototype/script.aculo.us library.
I'd never come across the Alien namespace before.

> Sorry for not reading the list thoroughly enough - I'm new to this
> whole Dojo business, that's why. How about I withdraw my module as
> soon as HTML::Dojo recaptures points 1 to 3? Or conversely I can spend
> some time to blend my API into that of HTML::Dojo.

I'm not sure what to do.
It's a bit unfortunate that both namespace are now out there, as both
modules do almost exactly the same thing, just in different ways.
It certainly wouldn't make sense for either Alien::Dojo or HTML::Dojo
to use the other, as both provide almost the same functionality.

Have you tried using the Alien::Dojo module for anything though? As
it's quite broken at the moment.
It only unzips the *.js, README and LICENSE files.
There are many .html, .css, .swf and .gif files required for history
support, storage support and the various widgets.

The main intended use for HTML::Dojo is by Catalyst::Helper::Dojo
which copies the Dojo distribution into a catalyst application
directory, and Catalyst::Plugin::Dojo which currently only provides a
method for use in template files, to output a script tag to load the
library.

I plan on adding a new method, so that the entire distribution can be
output to a directory, just like Alien::Dojo's install(). Once that's
added, would HTML::Dojo likely meet all your needs?

Carl