/ 
App-Wallflower-1.000
River stage one • 1 direct dependent • 1 total dependent
/ wallflower

NAME

wallflower - Sorry I can't dance, I'm hanging on to my friend's purse

SYNOPSIS

wallflower [options]

OPTIONS

--application <name>       Name of the .psgi application file
--destination <path>       Destination directory for the static files

--include     <path>       Library paths to include
--environment <name>       Plack environment (default: deployment)
--index       <filename>   Default name for index file (default: index.html)
--quiet                    Do not show progress

--help                     Print a short online help and exit
--manual                   Print the full manual page and exit

DESCRIPTION

wallflower turns your Plack application into a static web site.

While not suitable for all applications, there are a number of use cases where this makes sense. Most web sites are in essence static. Without a way for users to update information on the site (via forms, comments, etc) the only changes in the web site come from sources that you control (including the database) and that are accessible in your development environment.

Using a web framework like Dancer (or any other) for a static web site actually makes a lot of sense, just because it gives you access to all the features of the framework for that site. Think of it as extreme caching.

So, forms could be processed on your development server (e.g. to update a local database), and the pages to be published would be a subset of all the URL that the application supports.

Turning such an application into a real static site (a set of pages to upload to a static web server) is just a matter of generating all possible URL for the static site and saving them to files.

wallflower does exactly that. It reads a list of URL, strips them from their query strings, turn them into GET requests and saves the response body to a file whose name matches the request pathinfo.

wallflower is not a generic offline browsing tool.

EXAMPLE

The web site created by dancer -a mywebapp is the perfect example.

The complete list of URL needed to view the site is:

/
/404.html
/500.html
/css/error.css
/css/style.css
/favicon.ico
/images/perldancer-bg.jpg
/images/perldancer.jpg
/javascripts/jquery.js

Passing this list to wallflower gives the following result:

$ wallflower -a bin/app.pl -d /tmp urls.txt
200 / => /tmp/output/index.html [5367]
200 /404.html => /tmp/output/404.html [499]
200 /500.html => /tmp/output/500.html [510]
200 /css/error.css => /tmp/output/css/error.css [1210]
200 /css/style.css => /tmp/output/css/style.css [2850]
404 /favicon.ico
404 /images/perldancer-bg.jpg
404 /images/perldancer.jpg
200 /javascripts/jquery.js => /tmp/output/javascripts/jquery.js [248235]

Note that URL with a path ending with a / or a name without an extension will be considered to be a directory, and have the default index filename appended.

Any URL resulting in a status different than 200 will be logged, but not saved.

AUTHOR

Philippe Bruhat (BooK)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

wallflower started as a neat idea in a discussion between Marc Chantreux, Alexis Sukrieh, Franck Cuny and myself in the hallway of OSDC.fr (http://osdc.fr/) 2010, after Alexis' talk about Dancer.

Because a good pun should never be wasted, a first version of the program has been included in Dancer since version 1.3000_01.

The idea for App::Wallflower owes a lot to Vincent Pit who, while I was talking about wallflower and Dancer with Marc on IRC in January 2011, noted that this file generation generation scheme had nothing to do with Dancer and much more with Plack.

wallflower treats all Plack applications equally, even if the first version of the program was targetting Dancer only.

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 2010-2012 Philippe Bruhat (BooK), all rights reserved.

LICENSE

This program is free software and is published under the same terms as Perl itself.