OpenSourcery

A while ago, I told Jay Shirley (in a moment of weakness) that I'd co-maintain the Catalyst-Action-REST distribution. Over the past week, I've closed several bugs, and I feel comfortable enough with the codebase to start making more sweeping changes.

C-A-REST is certainly useful in its current state, but it has its warts. At the same time, I've been thinking about the fact that Catalyst 5.80 (svn) is built on Moose, and about how Moose could possibly help with some of C-A-REST's rough spots.

Here's a list of things I'd like to improve in the near future, in rough order of how much I've thought them through:

• Using roles instead of classes for every type of object (Action, Request, and Controller) will make it much easier for C-A-REST's modules to play nicely with other Catalyst extensions. The old classes will stay around for backcompat, but new code will be able to use with 'Catalyst::Controller::Role::REST' instead. (See also Catalyst::Controller::ActionRole, thanks to Florian Ragwitz.)
• Serialize/Deserialize plugins are currently only loaded from under Catalyst::Action:: -- there's no way to look under MyApp::Action:: or any other namespace. There's also no good way to pass configuration to plugins (a common request). Finally, they all share a lot of code, like looking up data in the stash or reading the body, that needs to be refactored.
• Serialize/Deserialize are symmetrical -- that is, they're forced to use the same Content-Type. This is OK for basic use, but it puts a pretty hard barrier on extending the basic de/serialization mechanism for application-specific content types, and I'd like to make it easier to specify that certain content types are only used in one direction or another.
• REST status helpers have clunky syntax and don't cover enough HTTP status codes. Calling $self->method($c, ...) makes me sad; we've talked about using a REST view and/or a REST response role instead. Whatever the solution, the REST component of Catalyst::Controller::REST needs to feel less bolted-on than it currently does.
• REST and Serialize/Deserialize are unnecessarily conflated. I'm not entirely sure they should even be in the same distribution, but they definitely need to be easier to use separately. Switching to roles may be enough to make me happy, here.

Check out Catalyst-Action-REST on github, and let me know what you think.