[Catalyst] Re: Perl::Rails?

[Shlomi Fish]

On Friday 09 December 2005 02:35, Ovid wrote:
> --- Rodney Clang <rodney.clang at lewan.com> wrote:
> > Are we not marketing ourselves enough in front of Tim or
> > whomever ?
> > Ideas??
>
> The Ruby on Rails framework is so hugely popular in large part due to
> the people who created it.  They've demonstrated their ability to
> market their product.  Regardless of the technical merits (and like any
> product Rails has pros and cons), successful marketing can be the key
> between a wonderful product's success or failure.
>
> The Portland Perl Mongers group is very active.  However, one of our
> largest turnouts (I stopped counting at 50) was for the Ruby on Rails
> demo.  I doubt we'd get a similar turnout for Catalyst ... unless it
> was marketed well.  If we had a Catalyst expert in town who can do as
> slick a demo as the Ruby folks did, I can probably drum a decent
> turnout with enough notice (hint, hint).
>
> The Perl Foundation has actually discussed putting effort behind
> marketing/announcing some of Perl's more successful "big" projects.
> Bricolage is an obvious candidate (our competitors usually charge in
> the six figure range).  Catalyst was also discussed, but here were some
> issues we saw:
>
> * No evidence of large, well-trafficked sites
> * Poor documentation.
> * Very little "buzz"

I can also add poor debugging ability to it. One essentially cannot debug 
functions in the core Controller Catalyst components, due to what I was told 
were "nested eval"'s. I don't care if it's a bug of perl or Catalyst - I 
don't care - I want to debug it in style. What I restorted to was to extract 
code out of my application and debug that, but it's a kludge.

Regarding documentation, I should note that a small patch I wrote for the 
Catalyst documentation: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/ticket/11 has remained 
completely un-modified in the bug tracker's since I filed it over 5 months 
ago. I was planning to follow this patch with other patches, but was waiting 
for it to be applied or at least be commented on.

And there's also this:

http://use.perl.org/~Shlomi%20Fish/journal/25108

I should note that since then, I sort of neglected working on my sample 
Catalyst app. (I have two other ideas that may be good for it or for Ruby on 
Rails or something similar).

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

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