Summersault Blog

The schedule of talks for the upcoming YAPC::NA 2010 Perl conference have been announced, and they include several presentations by Summersault staff:

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At Summersault we build websites with a modified version of the Titanium framework. While Titanium continues to work very well for us, I always like to keep up with other possibilities. There are always new places to find inspiration and there’s always room for improvement. In that spirit I’ve recently explored HTTP::Engine and Mojo. Looking at how these options fit into the bigger picture of Perl frameworks, I wrote an article called Evolution of Perl Frameworks for Perlbuzz.com. Here’s the full article.

Earlier this year, I made some notable contributions to various open-source projects, including:

• Tim Bunce, the author of Perl’s DBI asked me to be a committer on the DBIx::HA project, a high-availability/load-balancing Perl module.
• I uploaded a new release of CGI::Session, version 4.30. As the official maintainer of the module, I worked closely with Ron Savage who did most of the release work. Summersault will likely take advantage of these improvements in the future.
• Multiple people gave me praise for my help with the Darcs 2 release. One person wrote, “Mark Stosberg was an unsung hero of the darcs-2 project for diligently triaging and following-up on hundreds of bug tracker tickets. His quality-assurance work (including setting up automated buildbot tests) is an important reason that darcs-2 is much less buggy.” By patch count, I’ve committed the third most patches to the project due to numerous documentation and test suite improvements.

These are just some of the ways that Summersault staff participate in the online community and in the open-source software movement.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that just because we want to try to be all things to our clients doesn’t mean that we can be. Of course, for any given project, the conversation about what’s possible, and on what timeline, and at what cost is never a simple one. The bigger the project, the more complex that conversation becomes. It can be easy to over-promise and under-deliver if you’re not extremely careful.

Several years ago, we began using parts of the “Extreme Programming (XP)” software engineering paradigm in our development process, with the goal of improving our time estimates, better understanding what we were able to deliver to our clients and when. I’ve not found any part of XP to be more useful than the way it describes the interactions between these four variables:
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Today I uploaded the first release of Titanium, a web application framework. This project really began about eight years ago, with first release of CGI::Application.

CGI::Application was and is a great foundation for web applications and has always been well defined with a small scope for what it would provide in terms of a framework. Because of this it was able to mature and stabilize with few bugs ever reported and always provided great performance because of its small size. It grew in popularity, and over 50 CGI::Application plugins were released.

The contributed plugins were a great gift back to the community from the many users who made them, but for newcomers, the choices could be daunting. They meant getting started with CGI::Application for an application of any size often meant wading through the many options for plugins, yet often coming to the same conclusions about which ones to choose.

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