The Stack

By JT Smith from Madison.pm
Date: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 08:15 AM
Duration: 45 minutes
Target audience: Intermediate
Language:
Tags: deployment prerequisites

Every Perl application needs to include it's prerequisite stack right in the download, but most Perl developers believe in the UNIX shared libraries concept or that CPAN makes it easy enough for users. In this presentation, you'll learn why this is usually a terrible practice, and why it will ultimately keep most Perl apps from dominating their markets. Using a few simple guidelines outlined in this presentation, you can make your application more appealing to a wider audience, make it work on more platforms, make all deployments more robust, and dominate your market even over competing closed source applications. All of the knowledge shared was gained by going through this process twice, with two very large open source applications: WebGUI (Perl) and the Business Integration Engine (Java). So learn from someone who has faced the pain, and come out on top. Learn from my mistakes and successes.

Topics Covered:
1.How a prerequisite stack affects your users and potential users.
2.How a prerequisite stack affects stability.
3.How a prerequisite stack affects deployment to new platforms.
4.When to use or not use operating system packagers.
5.Automated installation and update mechanisms.
6.Choosing what goes into the stack.