[Catalyst] Page layout w/Catalyst

[Brandon Black]

On 12/15/05, Johan Lindström <johanl at darserman.com> wrote:
> At 17:08 2005-12-15, Brandon Black wrote:
> >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.
>
> No. I'd venture that a large part (in numerical terms) of all web
> applications built in Rails/Catalyst/x aren't public-facing web sites on
> the Internet, they are small, company-specific intranet/extranet applications.
>
> The type of application may be quite similar, but each application itself
> is specific to the problem domain and so needs to be written each time to
> solve the actual problem. Rails seems to be a competent platform at build
> on when creating this _type_ of apps.
>

I guess we disagree :)

I think in many cases, the difference between the custom
company-specific app and something else someone else wrote 6 months or
6 years ago is more a matter of customization than truly different
code.  Kinda like how those generic CRUD interfaces apply to editing
simple data in any table.  I think there's something even easier and
even more narrow out there somewhere than Rails for most of the apps
that are written easily in Rails (or if there isn't, most of the time
there probably should be), since they almost always fall under some
generic category like "Inventory Management", "blog/news/etc variant",
"simple systems monitoring tools", "repository browser", "scheduling",
etc.

I don't think many businesses have truly unique in-house webapp
software needs.  Perhaps you could write the ultimate variant of each
category as a customizable Rails app, and then people would just edit
a config file or use an admin interface to these Rails software
archetypes to do their custom company app without even knowing Rails,
for example.  But then again, if you're gonna write some ultimate
customizable software archetype for easy customization, you may as
well do it something as flexible as Catalyst instead :)

-- Brandon