One of the issues I've found with writing OpenInteract and SPOPS (both frameworks) is that I tend to use them in the ways that I use them. (Duh!) So the deficiencies others might see with a process have been in one of my many blind spots for some time.
For instance, I hadn't originally considered SPOPS to be something you'd use to write little scripts -- little scripts could use DBI directly or some other simple method. But little by little, without realizing it, I've created various shortcuts (or better, the means for shortcuts) so that such a thing is possible. One of the Perlmonks regulars mentioned he was interested in SPOPS and pinged me with a little script he created to scour a directory tree for MP3 files, read the info and save the info to a database as an object. In running it by me, he asked, "Can't I just specify the database connection info in the object configuration?"
I'd never thought about doing this before because I tend to use SPOPS with lots of objects where centralizing this information in a superclass makes more sense for maintenance and connection conservation. But once I thought about it for a minute, I knocked off a simple behavior to allow you to do exactly what the person asked for. Sweet. And then I thought about ways it could be easily enhanced (e.g., do genre checking against a CDDB, etc.)
So I'm going to try to scout out little (or big) tasks like this that not only might be done easily but that are also ripe for adding nifty functions easily.
(Originally posted elsewhere)