Roadmap for 2.8

The roadmap is currently work in progress.

Planned changes

Rewrite the web frontend from PHP to the Catalyst Perl framework.

Implement collection basket.

Of the planned changes the conversion to Catalyst is expected use most of the time.

Conversion to Catalyst

Functionality

The functionality is expected to be the same for most parts of the application except that the use of sessions will be removed from the search page.

Technology

The conversion will be based on the following Perl modules:

Moose

Template::Toolkit

DBIx::Class

Installation and deployment

Installation of dependencies will be based on .deb packages. As we cannot be restricted by the packages that are provided as part of Debian we need to create our own packages for all CPAN packages that are used.

When deploying an application update_target.pl will still be used. update_target.pl will still be able to replace any file from the source directory to the target directory. Over time it is expected that this functionality is not needed and that it will be replaced by a different system. What this will be is not known at this time.

To override the CSS styles for the application, the file 'catalyst/root/static/css/custom.css' should be replaced. This file is be default empty, but still loaded for all pages.