Sparky powering The Goo?

Sparky is a lean, mean webserving machine I developed for Turbo10 and Trexy. I found configuring and performance tuning Apache + mod_perl so painful I ended up writing my own webserver!

Sparky is doing a great job of serving millions of hits per day for Turbo10 and Trexy. It's faster than mod_perl, consumes much less memory, has few prerequisites and is written in pure Perl. Last week I added POST request handling so Sparky now serves The Goo too.

The next phase in the development of Sparky is to fuse its currently separate Request and Response objects into a Context object (ala Catalyst). But I'm not sure how far I should go? Should I emulate the Catalyst dispatch mechanism too? Will this retrofit easily with Uwe Voelker's Catalyst port of The Goo?

I don't want to make yet another Catalyst (e.g., Jifty) but Sparky can't help but benefit from distilling the lessons learnt from these frameworks and others (CGI::Application, CGI::Prototype etc). Hmmm. No matter what happens I need to improve Sparky for Turbo10 and Trexy and a new Context object with a simple dispatch mechanism is definitely on the cards.

The Goo on the other hand will have its own application-specific dispatch mechanism no matter what underlying webserver is used. Given a 'Thing' in a URL (e.g., goo.cgi?thing=HelloWorld.pm&action=p), we need to look up its type (e.g., Perl 5 Thing), the action to be performed (e.g., p -> profile) and dispatch to the appropriate handler (e.g., Goo::Thing::pm::Perl5Profiler).

Each Goo user will also need to run a local "Goo Server" to access local files (i.e., a local file finder) and a light weight standalone server like Sparky is required here. Hmmm. Stay tuned ...

Finding Files and Doing Things

I've integrated the file finder with the Care-O-Meter. This means I can jump to a file quickly. Here is the latest screenshot of the Care-O-Meter (see the file finder on the right):

This means I need a separate form for updating the locations of Things in the file system:

Cool. Now I don't have to bother about remembering where something is located - no more tiresome directory traversals - up, down, up, up, down. The Goo automatically looks in these locations when it sticks Things together.