Mason-starter creates a directory, where there are Mason, Apache and Postgresql configured to run together. Just write the templates and test it without being root or touching the system-wide settings.
This project aims to make Mason accessible for development of small projects. It is for people who would like to play-around with mason+apache+postgres, create a small web-portal or a standalone computer program, maybe having it connected to a simple database.
To develop a small web application, one possibility is learning and employing Zope or Ruby on rails. They are both excellent, and they both solve the problem in a good spirit.
For Perl fans, however, Mason seems to be a very compelling tool. One just opens an editor, starts scribbleing templates, and it works immediately. The problem is that sometimes even the most simple web portal needs an intranet part where login is neccessary, or a connection to a database.
One-by-one, neither of them is too hard to solve, however, it takes a bunch of steps:
Now this is where Mason-starter steps in: it creates a project for you, which makes Mason + Apache2 + PostgreSQL configured together in your project-directory. From that moment, you can write the templates and and start up your application without hassling with these components to be configured in the system directories. You can deploy this project directory to a server just by deplopying the project directory and arranging that in boot time this project also starts up. The apache and the postgresql servers (so your program) can run under your user-account, they do not need to be started by root.
Mason-starter grown out of my scripts that eased creating sites for me. What we did now is to fire up a public project, and decide to clean the code. I'll release the code as my time allows for me, although I don't expect it to be fully operational before December, 2006.
As a matter of fact, there exists a commercial product which may provide this functionality. As I discovered that product after starting this public project, I don't know about that too much,
We are almost releasing now... Testing, packaging is on the way, release is coming in a month.
You are very welcome to tell your thoughts or comments on the
mason-starter-devel mailing list, or by mailing to
.