Suggested Areas for Community Development

Given this new model, there will be many areas for community participation starting in January. In particular we will need work done in the following areas:

• Additional Email modules
• Additional data source modules
• DataSource, Authentication and DataValidation API Extensions
• Additional Application-level modules
• Building custom apps

The new modular framework will make it very easy for code to be shared among the community. The architecture was devised in order to make this possible.

New Security Enhancements and Development Template

All of the new modules and applications will follow a new enhanced regimen of security features. Added to the usual list of security considerations will be:

• The Security Template - We are writing a CGI template that can be used as the base of any new application. This template will automatically enforce some of the basic security considerations.
  
• Usage of -T, use strict;, and -w flags - All of the new modules and scripts will be taintmode compliant and use -w for extra security. Special attention will be paid to making sure the new suite of applications runs well under environments that are meant to provide scalability improvements such as mod_perl on Apache or FastCGI.
  
• We will be adding more documentation regarding how to protect secure files including the use of .cgi extensions for admin files, file renaming, the incorporation of index.html files in the CGI tree, and more detailed explanations on how to move admin files out of web server document tree. We will also redesign the architecture of applications so that it is very easy to move and rename the admin files.

Embracing Other Open Standard Technologies

We plan to support all of the following by March 1999:

• Integrating with Active Server Pages (ASP)
  • Since the majority of the applications will reside in objects, they will be relatively easy to glue together inside of the ASPs. ASPs are basically GUI glue that Microsoft IIS and some other Windows NT Web Servers make use of. Since ActiveState provides a Perl scripting engine for ASPs, we can glue the application components together and make use of ASP technology.
• Integrating with eXtensible Markup Language (XML)
  • HTML works OK for displaying data to users. But what about allowing other computers to process your Web Application data? What about being able to process one or more web applications' data in your program?

    This will be made much easier with XML. XML provides a loosely typed tool for marshalling data over the web. XML was designed to be lightweight and easy to parse, yet powerful enough to describe just about any set of data.

    XML. will be supported primarily by the Datasource module in two ways. First, XML documents will be able to be decoded and queried by the Datasource object. Second, the Datasource object will be able to interface with an XML-based display object to convert Datasource records and fields in an XML-friendly manner.

The Existing Perl Modules (Cont.)
Extropia WebWare Suite 2.0: Towards a New Application Development Framework for Server-Side Web-Based Applications in Perl and Java
Additional Resources