I’m reading now a book by Dan Brown, author of “DaVinci code”, titled “Lost symbol”. It is mostly about masons. And it quite resemble the previous books by this author. Anyway, it is riveting.
This seemingly off-topic introduction leads to the on-topic perl thing: the mason. It is a “High-performance, dynamic web site authoring system” and “solves the common problems of site development: caching, debugging, templating, maintaining development and production sites, and more.” and “you can embed Perl code in your HTML and construct pages from shared, reusable components.”. Well, sound nice. How it looks? Like this:
(there was something wrong here. I removed it 
)
Sadly, the FAQ on the official page seems to be neglected and is spammed by merchants of medications made to make your weenie harder. On the other hand, newest version is 1.44 form Jan 4, 2010 - so it is still developed.
Assuming that I would like to learn something new, like "something big, modern, to easy make web applications - with templates, cache, scalability, quick development" should I dive into mason, or better look for something else?
So, I have question, asking YOU for an insight about this like:
- mason is cool, and at least better to do the same by your own from scratch
- forget it, it is so 1990's, learn catalyst instead
- forget mason and catalyst, learn PHP symphony (- no problem for me, I know PHP - more or less )
- ruby on rails is the real thing (no, I will not learn ruby - at least now )
- the best is framework .... (something not mentioned above)
Please write your opinion below. Thank you.
See also:
- Website login with Perl
- Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP)
- Utf8 in web perl application (LAMP) – dbi, mysql
- Perl, PHP, corporate – continued.
- Utf8 horror at LAMP – accept charset
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7 responses to “Masons and mason”
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just a few notes:
* mason is still living, even if website was spammed. it’s great system, however, it’s not full framework.
* example you published is not mason code but tempate-toolkit
* when you use catalyst, you can use many templating engines, such as template-toolkit, or even mason.
* i can only recommend mason, if it fits your needs and attitude. one of the best features is that it uses perl as template language, so for perl hackers, you do not need one language for program and another for templates (as most advanced template systems need).
* there is great free book about mason at http://www.masonbook.com/
That’s Template Toolkit, not Mason
Hi,
I have a production site running Mason since 2001, and I can say that it is great.
It doesn’t split your app cleanly over the now-common three layers, MVC, and it requires a mod_perl installation (FastCGI support is awkward at best).
On the other hand, deployment is a breeze, assuming that all your app required modules are already installed. You only need to rsync the files over to the production server, no need to “reload” the server.
I still use Mason for quick-and-dirty sites, and even for some big sites. The lack of support for PSGI is my biggest gripe right now.
Bye
There’s work out there for integrating Mason with PSGI: “http://github.com/miyagawa/HTML-Mason-PSGIHandler”
Just not on CPAN yet. Sure people would love a hand getting it ready, not sure what’s considered unfinished.
I’m building a new Catalyst based website using Mason as the View since the devs here are quite proficient with it. Although most of the Catalyst examples are Template::Toolkit the Mason view works and has done the job. So give it a go!
Why does your post about HTML::Mason have sample Template::Toolkit code and a link to an article about TT?
@hdp, oliver:
> Why does your post about HTML::Mason have sample Template::Toolkit code
I do not know. Something must have happened, perhaps not enough coffee, unexpected attack of stupidity, or maybe aliens were messing with my brain
. Do not know how it happened, that I mistakenly put here TT. Sorry. 
http://Mojolicious.org/
The learning curve is much smaller in comparison to Catalyst, and it does much more for you than Mason. Moreover, it “feels” fresh, if that sort of thing appeals to you.
The documentation is clear enough to start using it, and the IRC channel #mojo is much more n00b friendly than #catalyst.
Join the revolution!