[jifty-devel] beginner at jifty needs help finding my way about

[William F. Dudley Jr.]

Hi,
I consider myself an experienced developer but am new to jifty, and wanted to
avoid ruby on rails because I already use Perl.

I've fooled around with the tutorials and am trying to build my own application
(the only way I can lear, I'm afraid), and cannot seem to find things in the
documentation, so I thought I'd ask here.

First question:

In one of the tutorials, one creates a lib/MyApp/View.pm, and in there it
says:
    # Display each reader in a <dl>.
    dl {
        dt { }
        dd { }
        }

I understand what this does, but where is the documentation for the functions
dl(), dt(), and dd() ?  Surely there must be other functions to create
other HTML
markup but I can't find them even after browsing the various docs for hours.

Second question:

I've created an App with two tables, one of which has "indices" into the other.

What documents should I be reading to figure out how to search for a record,
or to retrieve a record based on an index or other field in a table?  My record
pointers are NOT the native "autoincrement" unsigned int that one
would typically
use, since the application calls for records to have unique identifiers that are
hardware based, sort of like the MAC address on an ethernet interface.  So
even though my app will create records 1,2,3,..., they will have unique codes
based on the hardware, which will not, in general, be monotonically increasing
or start with 1.

Thanks in advance,
Bill Dudley