[Catalyst] "Catalyst - The Definitive Guide" and the "Catalyst Cookbook"

[Charlton Wilbur]

On Dec 22, 2005, at 11:13 AM, David K Storrs wrote:

> I would suggest dividing the book into two sections:  quick start  
> and Everything There Is To Know.  The quick start section should be  
> just that--a heavily emphasized section right at the front that  
> says "Here is what you need to know to have your app running and  
> doing useful things in 4 minutes, and doing 80% of what you need it  
> to do in 30 minutes."

I'd like to strongly caution against this sort of hyperbolic time  
estimate, because it's the sort of thing that registers with pointy- 
haired bosses and buzzword fanatics and is impossible to get un- 
registered.

I'm dealing with a client right now who has a complicated, finicky,  
inconsistent, and ever-changing business model.  I'm the programmer  
on the team that's putting his website together.  The *last* thing I  
want to impinge on his consciousness is "doing 80% of what you need  
your app to do in 30 minutes."  I couldn't put together the database  
definition for his business model in 30 minutes, let alone get his  
application running; in fact, the most difficult part of this whole  
thing has not been programming but in wringing the business rules out  
of him and getting him to make at least tentative decisions about his  
business model.

Mind you, I think it's *great* that Catalyst lets me focus on the  
problem domain and on client management rather than on the web fiddly  
bits.  I'd just prefer to not have to deal with upset clients who  
read somewhere that an entire web application could be 80% done  
within 30 minutes, which means that it could be well past done within  
an hour, and they're paying for two hours of my time so it had better  
be perfect.

And Catalyst has several selling points beyond "you can get a toy app  
running inside of an hour"; why not emphasize some of those as well  
("using an MVC framework means you aren't tied to the web, and can  
automate things without any less power"; "we have CPAN"; "object- 
oriented development means you can modularize and unit-test  
everything to help catch bugs"; or the one I'd like to see, "we make  
AJAX in Perl painless for the developer and reliably cross- 
platform"), to catch the attention of people who aren't working on  
small applications?

Charlton



-- 
Charlton Wilbur
cwilbur at tortus.com