Aortica

As I'm working more and more with Perl, I'm getting more annoyed that MovableType decided to create their own template language instead of use an existing one like XSLT or Template Toolkit.

Since I entered the world of web development from the PHP avenue, I didn't become aware of TT until I started learning about Catalyst only recently. Its too bad, because TT is really pretty amazing, especially since there is now a port to Python!

It would be really cool too if there were a Ruby port of TT, especially for use with Puppet. Oh well, at least the syntax isn't that different.

This is an excellent discovery, and I can't wait to try it out. First, let me explain:

• Aortica is perl
• Catalyst is perl
• Aortica is all about XML and XSLT
• Catalyst is all about MVC
• There is an XSLT view module for Catalyst

I've used Catalyst with the template toolkit, but I like XSLT much more as a template engine. I expect that I'll be able to integrate Aortica and Catalyst to some degree over the next few years. Excellent!

Last night I was able to get enough of the actions working that I'm ready to start on extensions.

The most important extension at this point is the development extension, which will give some general debugging information as well as a view port of the XML flow document which was generated during the request.

Very useful stuff for troubleshooting!

UPDATE: This is definitely the right thing to be working on. I've just dug through Config.pm, Init.pm, and Fence.pm and I'm remembering how Aortica is constructed. Currently the application dispatcher does the parsing of the config file and sets the location of the sitemap (fence) file. I'm not sure if that's the best way to do it.