Gantry (http://www.usegantry.org) is a Perl- powered Web application framework. Started as a proprietary toolkit some ten years ago, Gantry has evolved through three major revisions. In mid-2005, Gantry was released as open source software under the same license as Perl itself, and maintenance and enhancement continue to this day. Like many other frameworks, Gantry implements the classic Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern. However, Gantry allows you to use as much as or as little of the pattern as you’d like. If you code in Perl and want to both jumpstart and simplify your next Web application, Gantry can give you a boost.
Let’s build an application of moderate complexity from scratch using Gantry and its code generation framework, Bigtop. To keep things simple, this example uses Gantry’s built-in Web server. Migration to mod_perl is straightforward, and the Gantry documentation provides examples of deployments.
The first step is to install the Gantry and Bigtop packages from the CPAN. If necessary, install HTML::Prototype, File::Copy::Recursive, and Data::FormValidator first and then install Gantry and Bigtop.
When you install Gantry and Bigtop, provide valid pathnames (or accept the defaults) and answer “yes” to all of the prompts to install of the components and supplemental files. In addition to code…
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