mod_perl 2 Tutorial at OSCON this year

Hello all,

As you may have noticed, there is a bit of an uptick in Perl
representation at OSCON this year compared the the last couple of years
and I'm happy to be a part of that with my Intro to mod_perl 2 tutorial.

http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/public/schedule/detail/2819

You'll notice that it is an intro talk, so it may not be of interest to
the more experienced folks on the list. However, I'd welcome any input
if you have it.

My basic approach will be to try to give a general lay of the land with
regard to mod_perl's place in the web serving picture. I find that a lot
of the initial questions from beginners involve what goes where and what
exactly is being done by which components. This can all be very
confusing and a barrier to understanding things, but when you're trying
to get something done, you don't often look for the broad scope docs.
You just want an answer.

So I've structured the talk the way I perceive many people getting into
mod_perl. They might start with CGI acceleration and down the road
realize they can inject something interesting into the Apache request
cycle to solve a problem. My hope is people will walk out of the talk
with a clear picture of the tools that are available and how they fit
into the big picture.

I'll also cover migrating from 1 to 2 with an example module. I figured
I could do an actual module and give the changes back to the author or
release the new Apache2 version. Any suggestions for something fairly
small but useful under mod_perl 1 that hasn't been migrated?

(I was going to do: http://search.cpan.org/~petdance/Apache-Pod-0.22/,
but Theron Lewis beat me to it:
http://search.cpan.org/~kypreos/Apache2-Pod-0.24/)

Also, I'm giving the migration part of the talk at YAPC::NA this year.
The schedule isn't out yet, but the web site is here:

http://conferences.mongueurs.net/yn2008/

Please pass along the info to anyone you think might benefit from an
intro to mod_perl talk, or sign up yourself if you're in that situation.

Also, I'd be happy to hear any suggestions.

Thanks,
Jim



--
Jim Brandt
Administrative Computing Services
University at Buffalo

Re: mod_perl 2 Tutorial at OSCON this year

On Fri 18 Apr 2008, Jim Brandt wrote:
> They might start with CGI acceleration and down the road
> realize they can inject something interesting into the Apache request
> cycle to solve a problem.

Not so much for the beginner but to solve problems:

Apache2::Translation provides dynamic request configuration without restarting
apache. Similar to .htaccess but with several backends and a nice admin
frontend. From another point of view it looks like a perlish mod_rewrite.
Works mostly in URI Translation and MapToStorage. If you are interested and
know German I can provide a bit of text I am writing (when I have time) and a
few images.

Apache2::POST200 replaces replies to POST requests with HTTP code 200 with
redirects to the same URL. A keyword passed as parameter then tells the
server to ship the original answer. When a browser gets an HTTP code 200 as
reply to a POST request and the user presses "Reload" the browser asks if it
should repost the data. This is annoying and many people don't know how to
react. Apache2::POST200 solves that. It can even be deployed on a proxy.

Apache2::ModSSL provides access to mod_ssl exported functions like
$c->is_https, $c->ssl_var_lookup and $c->ssl_ext_lookup. (The latter looks
for x509 certificate extensions.)

Don't forget to point out that there is still plenty of work to do to improve
mod_perl and that fresh developers are welcome.

Torsten

--
Need professional mod_perl support?
Just hire me: torsten.foertsch@gmx.net