This tutorial is intended as a complement to the Embperl
documentation, not a replacement. We assume a basic familiarity with
Apache, mod_perl, and Perl, and the Embperl documentation. No prior
experience with EmbperlObject is assumed. The real purpose here is to
give a clearer idea of how EmbperlObject can help you to build large
websites. We give example code which could serve as a starting
template for your own projects, and hints about best practices which
have come out of real experience using the toolkit. As always, there
is more than one way to do it! Since EmbperlObject is an evolving tool, it is likely that these
design patterns will evolve over time, and it is recommended that the
reader check back on the Embperl website for new versions from time to
time.
| Motivation: Constructing Modular Websites | top |
Embperl is a tool which allows you to embed Perl code in your HTML
documents. As such, it could by itself handle just about everything
you need to do with your website. So what is the point of
EmbperlObject? What does it give us that we don't already get with
basic Embperl? As often seems to be the case with Perl, the answer has to do with
laziness. We would all like the task of building websites to be as
simple as possible. Anyone who has had to build a non-trivial site
using pure HTML will have quickly experienced the irritation of having
to copy-and-paste common code between documents - stuff like
navigation bars and table formats. We have probably all wished for an
"include" HTML tag. EmbperlObject goes a long way toward solving this
problem, without requiring the developer to resort to a lot of
customized Perl code. In a nutshell, EmbperlObject extends Embperl by enabling the
construction of websites in a modular, or object-oriented, fashion. I
am using the term "object-oriented" (OO) loosely here in the context
of inheritance and overloading, but you don't really need to know
anything about the OO paradigm to benefit from EmbperlObject. As you
will see from this short tutorial, it is possible to benefit from
using EmbperlObject with even a minimal knowledge of Perl. With just a
little instruction, in fact, pure HTML coders could use it to improve
their website architecture. Having said that, however, EmbperlObject
also provides for more advanced OO functionality, as we'll see later.
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