[Koha-devel] Current status of Plack in Koha staff client?

[Leif Andersson]

Hi,

during the last few days I have been looking at Plack.
Rather confusing. And I wonder: 

What is the current status of Plack in Koha staff client?

I started looking at koha 3.18. With the Plack patch applied.
I still had various utf8 problems in facets, in column location (of results), and I believe also in Patron search.
After upgrading to 3.20.01.000 (package install on Debian GNU/Linux 7.6 (wheezy)) I have not - so far - experianced any utf8 problems.

Does anybody know what was done to fix this?

In v 3.20 I still have a lot of different cache(?) problems, though.

Well, simple updates like global system preferences -> Staff client -> IntranetNav
seems to work fine. 
(any text is displayed on every screen in Koha, so it is easy to spot success/failure)
So if I change the text in a session (intranet:5001 plack), then the change is shown when I leave the preferences page and go to another koha screen. 
It is also shown in plack sessions started later on the same or on other machines.

But if I change i.e. sysprefs -> Searching -> setting UseQueryParser to "Try"
The change is not reflected in my current session
In fact it seems I can not make any plack driven session use QueryParser.
If I connect through port 8080 QueryParser is used.

If I check "About Koha" to see the recentness of my perl modules.
And then goes on to upgrade some of the modules. This will be poorly reflected in
any plack driven session launched *after* the upgrade!

Sometimes a plackdriven session may all of a sudden take me to Koha webinstaller!
re-Loading the previous page may solve the problem. (Caused by lost mysql connection?) 

All in all it gives the impression that Plack in Koha staff module is still very unstable and unreliable.
Does anyone have a contrary experiance?

If others have the same experiences as I have: are there any plans to fix the problems?
Has anyone done more systematic and more exhaustive tests? Has it been shared somewhere?

/Leif
Leif Andersson, systems librarian
Stockholm University Library
Sweden