[Catalyst] Page layout w/Catalyst

[Brandon Black]

On 12/15/05, Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur at tortus.com> wrote:
> I think there are two major reasons that Ruby on Rails is popular
> right now.  One is that it offers a single right way to create web
> applications:  if you follow their conventions, you get a web app
> with minimal pain, and their conventions are chosen to be the right
> thing in the vast majority of cases.  Two is that all sorts of nifty
> AJAX things are built right into it, and not only do you get a web
> app with minimal pain, you get AJAX with minimal pain.
>

The caveat of course is the "vast majority of cases" part.  It is
probably arguable that for those cases which map perfectly to the
expectations of a framework like RoR, the vast majority of
applications in those domains have already been written, or an even
tighter and more effortless way of generating a customized application
in that space has already been written.  In other words, one could
posit that any application which can be written easily in a RoR
framework perhaps shouldn't be written at all, at least not in
something as needlessly complex as RoR for such a task (as compared to
using a bundle of pre-made software, or a package even more specific
to the problem domain which allows for a bit of site customization).

Then there is the class of interesting problems/applications for which
sufficiently good code does not yet exist.  These must be written if
one wants to have the functionality one desires - there is no
alternative, and a narrow-path "framework" simply doesn't allow the
flexibility to do these new things very easily.  Catalyst does, while
still managing to abstract away a lot of the painful repetitive idioms
involved in writing web applications.

> Catalyst, because of its Perlish nature, won't ever appeal to the
> people who want one true way of creating web applications.  At best
> it will appeal to senior technical leads, who choose Catalyst and
> then build their organization's one true way on top of Catalyst.

I'm still mixed on whether this is a good or bad thing.  It's
certainly what's happening at my place.  I don't know if in the very
long term view of the health of the corporation if that's a good thing
or a bad thing, considering things like the difficulty it might pose
them to hire someone versed in Catalyst (or just a good perl hacker in
general), as compared to the relative ease with which they could have
hired a replacement team of substandard java programmers or something.
 Then again, I don't think many others here even think in such long
views anyways.

-- Brandon