[Catalyst] Re: Catalyst Digest, Vol 10, Issue 91

[mbailey at vortexit.net]

On 12/22/05 2:16 PM, "Charlton Wilbur" <cwilbur at tortus.com> wrote:

> 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?

This gripe apparently seems born out of frustrations with your client, but
you're not alone.  Clients wanting the world, wanting it built yesterday,
and for no cost, is a business mentality; it will still be around long
after both you and I are dead.  I believe saying you can have
authorization and the multi-tude of other "bitch-work" things done for
your app in "short time" IS A GOOD sell for Catalyst or any framework. 
CPAN, Not being tied to the web, and object-oriented development(and it's
associated unit testing) are all things that can be accomplished WITHOUT
Catalyst, so I don't feel those are strong selling points for it. It is
the speed at which these things can be accomplished, that's the selling
point.  So why not emphasize it?

_Marlon_

btw.  To catch the attention of people who aren't working on small apps,
you need to catch their CIO's and CIO's are interested in lowest common
denominators, how cheap can I get someone in here to work on this(ie. Good
Documentation and not complex Design), and how much time(ie. MONEY) will
this save me on X project.  Oh..and once this is written how difficult(ie.
Expensive) will it be to maintain this over X technology(ie. how stable is
it? how long has it been around? can I pay someone to fix it, if I can't
fix it myself? how much will that cost?).

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