[Catalyst] Bing!

[Sebastian Riedel]

Am 10.08.2005 um 22:53 schrieb Philip Edelbrock:
> I'm also having some fun with Catalyst.  After getting over the  
> initial hurdles of CPAN dependancies and using the helpers  
> correctly, it's pretty fun.
>
> <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?  I'm honestly a bit biased against moving to Ruby  
> simply because a sexy MVC framework uses it (Rails), but I'm being  
> persuaded by others at work by it's simplicity and marketing.</ 
> troll-alert!>
>
> 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.

Yes, Rails marketing is just awesome...

Well, i'm not really unpartial, but i'll try be fair. :)

* First, Catalyst is no port of Rails, it has fundamental  
philosophical differences, Catalyst was built with CPAN in mind, so  
you can easily have multiple views (TT/Mason...) and models  
(DBIx::Class, Tangram...) in the same app.
Rails doesn't do that, controller classes are strictly bound to model  
(table) classes, thats a bit like Maypole, but split into two classes.

* Catalyst's dispatcher is very flexible, you can have all kinds of  
uri's, even regex is supported while Rails sticks to the /class/ 
method/arg1/arg2/arg3 scheme, which requires a rewrite layer to get  
fancy urls like /index.html (yes thats against their own DRY slogan).

* Catalyst just needs a small glue to add more components, it's made  
to be extended, especially through multiple inheritance, which Ruby  
doesn't even support.

* Rails is also slower, thats because Ruby is generally much slower  
than Perl and Catalyst has a much more optimized dispatcher.

* Rails documentation is much better (no surprise since they can work  
fulltime on it)

* Rails is a all-in-wonder package including a orm and template  
system while Catalyst follows the CPAN philosophy to split everything  
into small packages.


So to make it short, Rails is better documented and very trendy  
(hyped) while Catalyst happens to be faster and much more flexible.


--
sebastian