Thursday, July 5, 2007

Catalyst on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

I'm staring a new web application with a coworker.
He already has a hosting account with GoDaddy, so I had my choice of Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, or Python2.2

Now, while I would have liked to use Django, I don't believe supports goes all the way back to Python2.2

So, now I am attempting to try out the Perl framework Catalyst. I've never written much in Perl before, but I'm attracted by the seemingly huge CPAN repository, and my bad experience with configuring Tomcat in the past. If this doesn't work out then I may end up with CakePHP.

To start out I googled for installing Catalyst on a shared hosting environment, however everything seemed to require shell access, which I don't seem to have at GoDaddy.

Looking for something like php_info for perl, I was able to find a nice script from MoveableType which checks for module installation and various other settings. Look here: http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/mtinstall#checking%20for%20perl%20modules
for mt-check.cgi

It's showing that I have a nice ext_lib directory in my home directory where I suppose I can put extra Perl modules, hopefully making this endeavor actually possible.