Crunch Time…

…But not for development 😦

I’ve a completely free week off at the moment, but it’s going to be followed by my end of year examinations. While these are relativly lightweight compared to what I’ll presumably have in the years to come, I don’t want to get complacement and mess these up. Hence, I’m going to be focussing on revision, so mb_server development will slow down a little bit.

I haven’t commited changes recently, but this doesn’t mean I haven’t been hacking away! My latest branch has a lot of work to do with viewing other users profiles, and preliminary work on user registration. I want to tidy this code up a little bit, and then I’ll push up it upstream. Of course, if we had a DVCS then you could just pull my repo… oh well! It would seem this point is no longer valid 😉

Hope my other fellow students are doing well 🙂

And so it begins!

I’ve jumped straight in with my work and feel like I’m making some quite good progress. I’ve tackled the landing page first to get to grips with Catalyst and Template Toolkit which are both very nice frameworks! Catalyst is very simple when you want to do simple stuff and it’s plugin framework is very transparent. Sessions are also working (with a minor setback to do with getting Catalyst to register cookies) and users can login and out, and view their own profile page.

You can’t create accounts yet, but because it uses the same Perl code as the original MusicBrainz site, I can just create accounts on that, and then login on my Catalyst server 🙂 Handy!

Today I’m going to take a break from exam revision and work some more on this work – I’m going to try and get profile page viewing complete, and make a good start on user registration. I’ve got a couple of other things on my todo list that I would like to get done soon (a couple of filters that work with UserPreference to display data the way the user wants it), but I don’t think I’ll tackle these today.

Oh, and Dave Evans has been nice enough to send me a patch with the basics to get mb_server running with Apache 2 and mod_perl 2. At the moment I’m only running on the Catalyst development server so haven’t had a chance to try any of this out yet, but it’s certainly going to be useful towards the end of the project when we start looking at deployment. Thanks Dave! 🙂

If you want to play with the server, check out Electrological on port 3000. The code is in the MusicBrainz Subversion repository (check out lib/MusicBrainz/Server/Controller and root for templates)