[Pagekit-users] need advice building installable pagekit-based app

[Shimon R. <sh...@ru...>]

Hi everyone,

I have a pagekit app that I'd like to make easily installable on
customers' computers.  Unfortunately this does not seem simple as it
usually takes me about an hour of installing things just to get my own
app deployed on a new computer.  Ideally, deployment would be as
simple as a download-and-run CGI script.  This means:

1. app must run either as a CGI or provide its own persistent
envionment that can be accessed from a CGI frontend
2. all dependencies must be packaged with the app
3. should run anywhere Perl runs, i.e. does not ship with binaries but
may compile them at install-time

I've noticed that Boris offers a free evaluation installation of
PageKit on Linux systems at http://pagekit.org.  It sounds like this
might meet criteria #1 and #2; my guess is that it runs on a bundled
apache/mod_perl server binary.  If that could be (1) made available
and (2) made to run on other Unix OSes, that might be helpful.

Other approaches I'm considering:

1. Run the app as a CGI: probably workable, but may be very slow.  I
recall seeing something about doing this on the mailing list or
somewhere, but can't dig it up now.  Pointers would be appreciated.
2. Bundle a lightweight pure-Perl webserver: this may be difficult, as
you'd have to reproduce certain parts of the apache API, but might be
a simple way to avoid CGI overhead.  If this could be made to work it
would almost certainly be the best solution.
3. Ship a complete virtual machine: deliver a complete system image,
to be run under VMWare player or a similar virtualization system.
This would probably be a Linux system with apache, mod_perl, and all
required modules, connected to either a bundled PostgreSQL database or
to an external database determined by the user.

Has anyone here ever built this sort of easy-deploy system?  I think
it would be of great value to the PageKit community and would love to
get a reusable version released as free software along with PageKit.

Your advice and ideas will be most appreciated.

thanks,
shimon.