Mason

A very efficient and flexible mod_perl-based dynamic web generation system, one of the best systems all-over in my opinion (main problem : it's very difficult to understand what you wrote six months ago...) -- LaurentDaverio

• What makes it so difficult to understand what you wrote six months ago?--JAPH

Wrapping UseModWiki within Mason

This is very old code for me (I switched to Python and Zope around 2000-2001), but fortunately I've kept archives :-)

What I would have liked to do (should have worked, but didn't - I was probably very close to the solution):

Basically, It would redirect UseModWiki's output to a temp file ('select' statement), and then copy this temp file to Mason's output ($m->out). I'm aware that it may not have been the most scalable/efficient/clean solution, but I was more interested in integrating the wiki within my site's layout (it's probably possible to use a tempfile in RAM instead of on-disk to speed things up).

<%perl>

    use File::Temp qw/tempfile/;
    my ($fh, $fn) = tempfile (DIR => '/tmp');

    select $fh;

    { require "/projects/Trad/cgi-bin/wiki" || die $!; }

    select STDOUT;
    open IN, "$fn" || die $!;
    while (my $in = <IN>) { $m->out($in) }
    close IN;
    unlink $fn;

</%perl>

Unfortunately, I never managed to get the "require" to work, so I resorted to copying UseModWiki's code inside my wrapper (given the long timespan between UseModWiki releases, this may not be as big a problem as I thought at the time):

<perl>
    use File::Temp qw/tempfile/;
    my ($fh, $fn) = tempfile (DIR => '/tmp');

    select $fh;

{

############################################################

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
# UseModWiki version 0.92 (April 21, 2001)
# Copyright (C) 2000-2001 Clifford A. Adams

[snip]

&DoWikiRequest()  if ($RunCGI && ($_ ne 'nocgi'));   # Do everything.
1; # In case we are loaded from elsewhere
# == End of UseModWiki script. ===========================================

############################################################

}
    select STDOUT;
    open IN, "$fn" || die;
    while (my $in = <IN>) { $m->out($in) }
    close IN;
    unlink $fn;
</%perl>

I'm fairly confident that this should work with any version of Mason and UseModWiki, as the latter has an extremely clean code, which allows it to be used as a package inside a main Perl script, without suffering from side effects such as overwriting global variables.

--LaurentDaverio