1 =head1 Flox: A Free Social Networking Site
3 Friendster, Tribe, and now Google's Orkut - it seems like in early 2004,
4 everyone wanted to be a social networking site. At the time, I was too
5 busy to be a social networking site, as I was working on my own project
6 at the time, a web application server called Maypole. However, I
7 realised that if I could implement a social networking system using
8 Maypole, then Maypole could probably do anything.
10 I'd already decided there was room for a free, open-source networking
11 site, and then Peter Sergeant came up with the hook - localizing it to
12 universities and societies, and tying in meet-ups with restaurant
13 bookings. I called it Flox, partially because it flocks people together
14 and partially because it's localised for my home town of Oxford and its
17 Flox is still in, uh, flux, but it does the essentials. In this chapter,
18 we're going to see how it was put together, and how the techniques shown
19 in the L<Request.pod> chapter can help to create a sophisticated web
20 application. Of course, I didn't have this manual available at the time,
21 so it took a bit longer than it should have done...