# NAME Web::Library - Manager for wrappers around client-side libraries # SYNOPSIS # in your Catalyst application: my $library_manager = Web::Library->instance; $library_manager->mount_library({ name => 'jQuery' }); $library_manager->mount_library( { name => 'Bootstrap', version => '2.3.0' }); __PACKAGE__->config( 'Plugin::Static::Simple' => { include_path => [ $library_manager->include_paths ] }, ... ); # in an HTML template ... [% web_library.css_link_tags_for('Bootstrap', 'jQuery') %] ... [% web_library.script_tags_for('Bootstrap', 'jQuery') %] # DESCRIPTION There are well-established ways for web applications to manage server-side dependencies, like `Makefile.PL` or `cpanfile` - but what about client-side dependencies? So you develop and maintain a number of web applications, and all of them use some client-side libraries like jQuery or Twitter Bootstrap or Underscore.js. You have to copy the relevant JavaScript, CSS and image files to a directory containing static files for each web application. This involves quite a bit of copying around and version maintenance. Web::Library can help you. The idea behind Web::Library and its related distributions is that client-side libraries are installed as shared files of standard CPAN distributions. Web::Library itself is a manager for those libraries. A web application that wishes to use one or more client-side libraries can tell Web::Library to include either the latest or a specific version of those libraries. These managed libraries can then be used as static files with web application frameworks. In the case of [Catalyst](https://metacpan.org/module/Catalyst) you might use [Catalyst::Plugin::Static::Simple](https://metacpan.org/module/Catalyst::Plugin::Static::Simple) as shown in the synopsis. Web::Library is a singleton object, so you can add client-side libraries in different parts of your application. For example, you might have common librares that are included in all of your web applications, but then also want to manage application-specific libraries. Only client-side libraries whose license permits redistribution can be managed this way. Forunately, most, if not all, popular client-side libraries have such permissive licenses. # METHODS - instance Returns the singleton Web::Library object that manages all client-side libraries. - mount\_library Adds a specific version of a client-side library to the list of managed libraries. Takes a hashref of named parameters. Valid parameters are: - name The name of the client-side library. The manager will try to load the `Web::Library::$name` class. For example, [Web::Library::Bootstrap](https://metacpan.org/module/Web::Library::Bootstrap) is a distribution wrapper for Twitter Bootstrap. - version A distribution wrapper will contain various versions of the wrapped client-side library. Using this parameter you can specify the version you want. Refer to the relevant distribution's documentation to see which versions are available. This parameter is optional; if omitted, the latest version is used. - include\_paths Client-side library files are installed as shared files as described in [File::ShareDir](https://metacpan.org/module/File::ShareDir). The `include_paths` method returns the absolute paths to shared directories for all managed libraries. ## ASSET-RELATED METHODS Web::Library can also help you with including a library's CSS and JavaScript files in the web page templates. If you expose an instance of Web::Library to your templates, you can add the relevant `` and `