What's cool about Jifty? (Buzzwords)

DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself)

Jifty tries not to make you say things more than once.

Full-stack

Out of the proverbial box, Jifty comes with one way to do everything you should need to do: One database mapper, one templating system, one web services layer, one AJAX toolkit, one set of handlers for standalone or FastCGI servers. We work hard to make all the bits play well together, so you don't have to.

Continuations

With Jifty, it's easy to let the user go off and do something else, like fill out a wizard, look something up in the help system or go twiddle their preferences and come right back to where they were.

Form-based dispatch

This is one of the things that Jifty does that we've not seen anywhere else. Jifty owns your form rendering and processing. This means you never need to write form handling logic. All you say is "I want an input for this argument here" and Jifty takes care of the rest. (Even autocomplete and validation)

A Pony

Jifty is the only web application framework that comes with a pony.

Introduction

If this is your first time using Jifty, Jifty::Manual::Tutorial is probably a better place to start.

new PARAMHASH

This class method instantiates a new "Jifty" object. This object deals with configuration files, logging and database handles for the system. Before this method returns, it calls the application's "start" method (i.e. "MyApp->start") to handle any application-specific startup.

Most of the time, the server will call this for you to set up your "Jifty" object. If you are writing command-line programs that want to use your libraries (as opposed to web services) you will need to call this yourself.

See Jifty::Config for details on how to configure your Jifty application.

Arguments

no_handle

If this is set to true, Jifty will not create a Jifty::Handle and connect to a database. Only use this if you're about to drop the database or do something extreme like that; most of Jifty expects the handle to exist. Defaults to false.

logger_component

The name that Jifty::Logger will log under. If you don't specify anything Jifty::Logger will log under the empty string. See Jifty::Logger for more information.

config

An accessor for the Jifty::Config object that stores the configuration for the Jifty application.

logger

An accessor for our Jifty::Logger object for the application.

You probably aren't interested in this. See "log" for information on how to make log messages.

handler

An accessor for our Jifty::Handler object.

This is another method that you usually don't want to mess with too much. Most of the interesting web bits are handled by "web".

handle

An accessor for the Jifty::Handle object that stores the database handle for the application.

api

An accessor for the Jifty::API object that publishes and controls information about the application's Jifty::Actions.

app_class(@names)

Return Class in application space. For example "app_class('Model', 'Foo')" returns YourApp::Model::Foo.

By the time you get it back, the class will have already been required

Is you pass a hashref as the first argument, it will be treated as configuration parameters. The only existing parameter is "require", which defaults to true.

web

An accessor for the Jifty::Web object that the web interface uses.

plugins

Returns a list of Jifty::Plugin objects for this Jifty application.

find_plugin

Find plugins by name.

class_loader

An accessor for the Jifty::ClassLoader object that stores the loaded classes for the application.

setup_database_connection

Set up our database connection. Optionally takes a paramhash with a single argument. This method is automatically called by "new".

no_handle

Defaults to false. If true, Jifty won't try to set up a database handle

pre_init

Defaults to false. If true, plugins are notified that this is a pre-init, any trigger registration in init() should not happen during this stage. Note that model mixins' "register_triggers" is unrelated to this.

If "no_handle" is set or our application's config file is missing a "Database" configuration
section or has a "SkipDatabase: 1" directive in its framework configuration, does nothing.

app_instance_id

Returns a globally unique id for this instance of this jifty application. This value is generated the first time it's accessed

background SUB

Forks a background process, and ensures that database connections and sockets are not shared with the parent process.

admin_mode

Returns true if the application is in admin mode. This should be used instead of "Jifty->config->framework('AdminMode')".