[Catalyst] Bing!

[Perrin Harkins]

On Wed, 2005-08-10 at 13:53 -0700, Philip Edelbrock wrote:
> <troll-alert!>We're looking at moving to a MVC type development  
> system at work.  Being familiar with Perl for years, I'm looking at  
> Catalyst.  Others at work are excited about Ruby-On-Rails.  We're  
> trying to compare each objectively.  Has anyone else gone through  
> this exercise?
[...]
> BTW- It now comes to mind that it would be very helpful to have a  
> Catalyst vs... page on the wiki.  It simply isn't obvious what the  
> +/-'s are between things like Catalyst, RoR, Cake, a Java-based  
> solution (e.g. WebObjects), etc.

There is probably less of a difference here than you might imagine.  I
think you'd be crazy to leave a platform you know well (i.e. Perl or
Java or Ruby or PHP and the associated libraries) just to use a
different MVC framework.  Rails uses something called ActiveRecord which
is practically identical to Class::DBI and uses a templating system that
I find less appealing than TT, but these things are much less important
to actual productivity than using a language you know well.  Ruby and
Perl have similar levels of abstraction, so there is unlikely to be the
sort of gain that people sometimes talk about when switching from
complex Java frameworks.

In short, my opinion is that the biggest problem with Rails is the fact
that it's written in Ruby and you don't know Ruby.  I also suspect that
the number of available Ruby developers for hire is pretty slim compared
to the (already not as big as I would like) number of Perl ones, simply
because of the relative popularity of the languages.

- Perrin