[Catalyst] Why Catalyst instead of Ruby on Rails?

[John Siracusa]

On 11/12/05 6:17 PM, Philip Edelbrock wrote:
> You may have meant this, but just to be clear, almost nothing is
> mandatory in Rails.  There are just 'defaults'.  Most models (if you
> are going with the flow) are almost empty files because they assume
> things like the table name, an id column, and database connectivity
> as described in database.yml.  You can do things like connect to
> bazaar legacy tables, it's just that your model will look a bit
> messy. ;')

Yeah, Rails does tend to make customization feel dirty.  "What?  You're not
going to use the conventional name for that table?  Very well, I sentence
you to use shameful custom configuration!"  Totally buying into the
convention stuff is definitely the cultural and technological path of least
resistance in Rails.

And there's no denying it, the convention path is appealing.  I thought long
and hard about adding a healthy dose of convention to my Perl RDBMS-OO
mapper module in order to reap those benefits, but I was stuck on the
details.  *Which* convention?  My favorite?  The most popular?  Something
new?

In the end, I decided to use my personal favorites, but then I encapsulated
all of those decisions inside a "convention manager."  The idea is that
anyone (or any project or organization, etc.) can make their own custom
convention manager that encapsulates *their* preferred conventions, and then
use that instead of the default.  That's something I wish Rails would do,
and it's maybe not a bad idea for Catalyst too...

-John