Just barely not Perl 4: diving into the old WebWebX codebase

Hoo boy.

I’ve put the basics in place now: there’s an App::WebWebXNG.pm nodule, and I’ve moved the page management and file locking modules into /lib. The load tests for the existing library modules pass, but there aren’t any functional tests yet.

Now, on to the old core script, webwebx.pl.

I’ve imported it as close to as-is as possible into App::WebWebX.pm, and added a main if not caller() to run the old script as the main program.

This script was just barely converted from Perl 4. There’s a giant pile of globals, and the majority of the “database” stuff it does is in DBM (if anyone still remembers that). I don’t even know if DBM still exists in more modern Perls!

All of the HTML generation is from interpolated print statements. There’s no CSS (browsers didn’t even support such a thing at the time; it was Mosaic or nothing. Okay, maybe IE, but the number of Windows machines on base at GSFC that were being used by our user community was probably countable on one hand.).

This should be convertible to Mojo::Template relatively easily, which is good. And the command dispatch is driven off a hash of code references, so that should work fairly well too.

It’s not terrible, it’s just old. Well, off to see how much will work!