OpenInteract::Startup

The OpenInteract::Startup is a bootstrapper software that initiates the environment by reading modules. If you're looking to set up an OpenInteract environment outside the typical Apache and mod_perl context, this software will come in handy. After you have installed it, you can begin by importing it as such:

 use strict;  use OpenInteract::Startup;

From here, the software can help you initialize the environment. One of the ways this can be done is using the setup_static_environment parameter. With this parameter, you can set a directory as the root for your website. Here is an example of how this can be done:

 my $R = OpenInteract::Startup->setup_static_environment(  '/home/httpd/MySite' );

The software also comes with the setup_static_environment_options parameter, which makes it easy to read the website directory from the command-line. You can also choose to read the website directory from a specified environment variable. Here is an example of how this can be achieved:

 my $R = OpenInteract::Startup->setup_static_environment_options();

For those using Apache/mod_perl, the OpenInteract::ApacheStartup is available for that purpose. One of the primary objectives of the OpenInteract::Startup module is to make OpenInteract initialization simpler, not only in a mod_perl environment but also in a single-use context. For example, when you're creating a script to be run as a cron job, you shouldn't have to include 50 lines of initialization just to create the framework.

This software has a number of functions that should be (hopefully) independent of the OpenInteract implementation. It should minimize the number of modules that you need to include in your code, thus making it easier to add backward-compatible functionality. The software's implementation is so efficient that most of the time, all you need is to include the 'use' statement for the module, and everything else is taken care of.