Of getting closer

So the work project has take a giant leap forward through burning some midnight oil last night. Through my failings, I've come to better understand Catalyst, how jQuery and it's plugins are nice, but not the right tool for the job, and how reverting back to trust Template::Toolkit, while ugly, gets the job done.

That said, I have a working datagrid. Some values are hardcoded at the moment to match the schema, but eventually, I will have it all automagical, down to the generation of the edit fields based on either data_type or additional metadata stuff into column_info.

So what was it that finally let me do the grid thing that I wanted? Ext. Now, I know some of you really disdain Ext as a company. And you have every right to dislike them. They commit the worst licensing FUD ever. Head on out to their site and see what I mean. Basically telling people that they must pay for a license if they are developing "commercial" software. Except that completely ignores the fact of how the GPL (version 3 specifically) works. in the grand scheme of things, I am developing "commercial" software in that it serves a business purpose and money is changing hands, but what Ext fails to make clear is that use of GPL software in those cases is covered. I am not distributing anything. I can eat up all of the GPL'd code I could ever want and never release a damn thing. The terms of the license are awesome like that. And yet it is "commericial."

Anyhow, beyond the bullshit with Ext licensing FUD, they have a rather solid UI model in their javascript library that very closely fits how desktop toolkits work. You can have windows, GTK/TK style layouts, decent events model, etc. Not only that, they have *gasp* a GridPanel. Throwing in some abstractions for "proxying" data, storing it, and providing a consistent interface for the UI to use, you have a very solid paradigm for doing web UI.

But there have been some bumps along the way. Catalyst::Controller::DBIC::API, while providing a fantastic set of functionality, leaves much of the customization up to the end developer to figure out. So I peaked inside the module and about went blind, heh. No, it really isn't that bad, it just needs some love and more of the steps it takes broken down some more into finer grained portions to allow the kind of customization that I required. For example, Ext's JsonReader and JsonWriter expect things in what I could consider a more normal format. Except DBIC::API doesn't allow you to make those changes. Oh sure you can override the format_list method, except you have no clue what to do without opening up the source. And there are lots of places like that. Where I had to explicitly dig into the source to figure out how to apply customizations. but in the end, I have the two talking to each other and even delivering metadata to the JsonReader/Store instead of hard coding things on the javascript side.

So after I get the work project squared away I will revisit DBIC::API and give it some lovin'. And then take that, with some Ext GPLed code, and build the real automagical datagrid that I wanted to build from the beginning.