[Catalyst] What is the point of all these "wrapper modules" ?

[Dami Laurent (PJ)]

Hi all,

I love the main core of Catalyst, but I don't understand why there are
so many "wrapper modules" (Plugins, Views, Models). CPAN already has
many, and new wrappers come out every day. Most of them do almost
nothing except forward method calls to other CPAN modules outside of
Catalyst. As far as I understand, the only advantage of glueing things
in that way is that the modules will be autoloaded by Catalyst, and you
don't need to "use Some::External::Module" from the Catalyst code.

However, there are also some disadvantages :
- CPAN becomes too fat
- some usual analysis tools or IDEs get confused by autoloaded modules
- programmers have to learn two APIs : the main meat of the external
module plus the wrapper API.

For one of my Intranet applications I needed CGI::FormBuilder ; but I
preferred to directly write "use CGI::FormBuilder" in MyApp.pm rather
than writing a wrapper Catalyst::Plugin::CGI::FormBuilder.

Am I missing something ?

Regards, 

Laurent Dami
Conseiller en systemes d'information
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