Well, the framework has been up and running as CGI on NT. It's just such a waste that it makes my spine cringe every time I think about it. Oh well. At least when they start doing some real work on that machine, we have an upgrade path for them (PerlEx to the rescue!).
Finally figured out what I think is a decent error reporting scheme between SPOPS and the framework. Before, SPOPS would die with a hashref with various pieces of information inside it. All fine and good, and sets things up for in the future calling die with an object instead (Alzabo has stuff setup like this, altho I don't know how well it works.)
However, the problem comes when you've got a eval {} wrapped around something that could be setting $@ to either a hashref or the normal string. Uh oh. Fortunately, the mod_perl guide comes to the rescue, courtesy of the ever-present Matt Sergeant. In it you see how to override the CORE::die function in perl and wrap your own. Neat, I thought, just check to see if $@ is a hashref and if not, put it inside one. Then everything checking the results of an eval {} can expect a hashref.
Of course, silly me forgets about the various CPAN modules being used. They certainly can't be expected to check whether $@ is a hashref or not. It's possible to overload the stringify 'operator' so that evaluating $@ (the hashref) in a scalar context actually returns what's in $@->{error}. But that's a little too much mucking about in the base expected behavior for me, particularly for something I'd like other people to use :)
So, I'm simply going to have all the SPOPS classes and objects set error information in a common package which anyone can inspect as needed. And on an error, they'll die with a simple scalar. And everyone will be happy.
Lesson learned: keep simple things simple.
(Originally posted elsewhere)