Copyright (c) 1998-2002 by Jonathan Swartz. All rights reserved.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the same terms as Perl itself.

Welcome to Mason, a Perl-based web site development and delivery
system.  Mason allows web pages and sites to be constructed from
shared, reusable building blocks called components. Components contain
a mix of Perl and HTML, and can call each other and pass values back
and forth like subroutines. Components increase modularity and
eliminate repetitive work: common design elements (headers, footers,
menus, logos) can be extracted into their own components where they
need be changed only once to affect the whole site.

Other Mason features include powerful filtering and templating
facilities, and a HTML/data caching model.  See
http://www.masonhq.com/ for more information.

PREREQUISITES

Mason requires Perl 5.005 or greater, and the following CPAN modules:

* Params::Validate

* Exception::Class

* Class::Container

* File::Spec

* Scalar::Util

The following CPAN modules are optional for certain features, but not required:

* Apache::Request

* Cache::Cache

* CGI.pm

INSTALLATION

To install Mason, run the standard sequence:

	perl Makefile.PL
	make
	make install

By default, Mason will prompt you for information about where Apache
is installed so that it can do tests with a live Apache server.  If
you would like to skip this, invoke the Makefile.PL like this:

        perl Makefile.PL --no-prompts

After Mason is installed, you will need to activate it by adding some
directives to your Apache configuration files.

The included pod docs have been pre-converted to HTML for you and
placed in the htdocs/ directory. The Mason overview (a good place to
start) is in Mason.html.

WARNINGS!

* Don't use Mason with an older mod_perl DSO (dynamic shared object).

Using Mason with a mod_perl DSO may cause your Apache server to crash
silently at startup, or fail intermittently. The fix for this problem
is to install Apache/mod_perl with mod_perl compiled statically into
the Apache binary.  Packages of Apache with a static mod_perl are
available around the net.

Testing with recent mod_perls showed improvements, but because this
bug can be so intermittent and difficult to spot, mod_perl DSO with
Mason is still strictly unsupported.

* Don't use Mason with PerlFreshRestart.

The mod_perl PerlFreshRestart directive attempts to reload modules on
restart in a very simplistic way. Mason cannot be reloaded this way.
The Apache::Reload module from CPAN does a much better job, and
appears to work with Mason.  However, the safest thing to do is to
actually stop and start the server.

GETTING HELP

The official Mason web site is at http://www.masonhq.com/.  There
you'll find Mason documentation, news, etc.

The FAQ can be found at http://www.masonhq.com/docs/faq/.

Several mailing lists exist for Mason users and developers. Full
information can be found at
http://www.masonhq.com/resources/mailing_lists.html.

There is a book about Mason, _Embedding Perl in HTML with Mason_, by
Dave Rolsky and Ken Williams.  This book is published by O'Reilly and
Associates.  The book's home page is http://www.masonbook.com/.

CODE EXAMPLES

The samples/ directory contains a few basic components.

The Mason community collaboration system (http://www.masonhq.com/)
contains, among other things, an archive of contributed code.

Links to various articles containing code examples are listed at
http://www.masonhq.com/docs/articles.html.

REPORTING BUGS

Send bug reports to the user's mailing list for quickest response.  But
first check the mailing list archives and the official bugs list on
the Mason site to see if the problem has already been reported.

For all bug reports indicate your architecture, Apache/Perl/module
versions, etc. For installation problems send your handler.pl and
httpd.conf. For component problems try to isolate the bug in a single
small component or set of components, and send those.

If you are experiencing test failures, please run the tests like this:

        export MASON_VERBOSE=1

        make test TEST_VERBOSE=1

and send the output along with the bug report.  Otherwise we'll just
ask you to do this before we can do anything.

LICENSE

Mason was originally developed for the Internet technology group at
CMP Media, a publisher of technology magazines. CMP
graciously supported our efforts to release Mason as open source
software to the Perl community.  However, CMP has NO direct
involvement with the open source release and bears NO responsibility
for its support or maintenance.

Mason is provided "as is" and without any express or implied
warranties, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of
merchantibility and fitness for a particular purpose.

Mason is released under the same terms as Perl itself.  For more
information see the "README" or "Artistic" files provided with the
Perl distribution.

AUTHOR

Jonathan Swartz
swartz@pobox.com

Dave Rolsky
autarch@urth.org

Ken Williams
ken@mathforum.org
