Perl/catalyst blog

Despite being a new blog, Jamie has got the name perldev.blogspot.com, and in it describes some woes with Catalyst installation.

Virtual hosting

I've been recommended slicehost.com for virtual hosting. Prices start at $20/month, so you for twice or three times what you may pay for shared hosting you get a virtual server to yourself. I haven't used them myself, so I can't personally vouch for them, but it looks good.

One warning though, you may have to wait up to about 5 weeks if you pay 3 months in advance - pay 12 months in advance and it should be less than a week.

Catalyst and dreamhost

Continuing my adventures with the Perl Catalyst Framework. I've spent a few days trying to get it to work on Dreamhost. There are references to it out there, and some pointers, but no sign that anyone's actually managed to get it working under FastCGI.

So now I'm pondering whether to risk another shared hosting company, or pay the extra for a virtual server, with more control.

EC2

My latest bit of playing around, er, investigation, is with Amazon's EC2 service. I'm thinking of using it for website hosting. I don't expect the website will get much use, but I'm hoping that I can just run up new instances if I need them, and use the simple DNS round robin load balancing to share the load.

From my research there are better ways to load balance, but this should be enough at the moment. Now I just have to pick a suitable distribution and try out my Catalyst application on it.

tags: ec2

Installing Catalyst part 2

Things were going well, until I found a Catalyst plugin needed compiling. The existing system I'm working on was developed under Linux. You can get C compilers for Windows, but I decided to go for the path of least resistance and I'm now downloading an Ubuntu virtual machine.

Adventures with Catalyst

So I've got this Catalyst project to pick up. Google analytics tells me that lots of people come here looking for Catalyst Framework. So far they haven't got much to read. Until now...

As the Catalyst Manual says:

One of the frequent problems reported by new users of Catalyst is that it can be extremely time-consuming and difficult to install.

It does go on to explain why though.

It points to instructions at http://catalyst.infogami.com/install/windows which in turn points to repositories that don't exist any more. However one does, so I start PPM, tell it about the Theoryx5 repository, install it, and go home. More tomorrow...

Another pie - Perl Catalyst framework

As the strapline to this blog says, I have my fingers in many pies. One of the pies that's come my way is a project involving the Perl Catalyst framework. Although I haven't heard any talk of it outside of this project, it does get mentioned in the same breath as Ruby on Rails, Django, J2EE, Zope etc.

Another learning curve to ascend... It's fun though.

tags: Perl, Catalyst