Wow! (was Re: [Catalyst] How do you talk about Catalyst in 25 minutes?)

[Marcello]

Jules Bean ha scritto:
> Chisel Wright wrote:
> 
>> it didn't have the same Wow! factor
>> as Django, and to some extent the RoR one.
> 
> 
> 
> Well.
> 
> Do we want Catalyst to have a wow! factor?
> 
> (This is *not* a rhetorical question).
> 
> I'm using Catalyst in my day job, like many people on this list. For 
> that purpose I couldn't care less if it has a wow! factor. I want it to 
> be robust, extensible, sensible, powerful, and fast. I don't need it to 
> be idiot-proof (at the programmer end) because I'm not an idiot. I don't 
> plan to hire idiots to work for me, either. Of course, I want it to 
> build idiot-proof applications, but that's quite different, isn't it?
> 
> However, as a natural evangelist and loyalist, rather than as a 
> programmer, I would of course like it to have a wow! factor. So perhaps 
> we can talk about that.
> 
> Personally, I think we can get quite a bit of wow! just with a better 
> scaffolding. I haven't yet looked at Zbigniew's scaffolding he uploaded 
> to the wiki; it sounded promising. So, having not even looked at it, let 
> me suggest what I think we need:
> 
> - A scaffolding script which creates two interfaces to an existing DB.
>   - An 'admin' CRUD interface featuring:
>     - logins required (and hence, session support)
>     - The ability to get a complete overview of the database, with
>       sensible paging by default
>     - The ability to do arbitrary modifications (INSERT/UPDATE not
>       CREATE) in ways which sensibly respect relationships.
> 
>   - 'user' view-only interface containing
>     - browse
>     - search
> 
> - Some really nice bundled CSS files which make the whole thing 
> beautiful. (Ideally involving *no graphics* but just really slick CSS)
> 
> - The generated code to be sensibly structured to make the a sensible 
> starting point for extra, 'real' functionality.
> 
> - The generated code to use the existing Catalyst config framework to 
> allow the programmer to choose which tables are accessible to users, and 
> which are editable by users (defaulting to 'all' and 'none').
> 
> 
> If you want Wow!, then the feature list above gets you pretty close to 
> 'IMDB in 15 minutes' that someone suggested.
> 
> In the ideal world this would not only be a cool wow 15 minute demo, but 
> it would also be somethign that real programmers would use as a first 
> step in building an app. It has to be cool enough to look nice and still 
> produce practical sensible code.

This gives two tipes of Wow!, one at the programmer end and one at the 
user end.

If a generated example app looks slick and has good functionality, we 
get a high Wow! _user_ factor.
For example, the 'classical' example Maypole app (i.e. the 'crud 
interface in 20 lines of code') had a very high Wow! user factor.

If this slickness and functionality is backed by clean end easily 
extensible code, then we get an even higher Wow! _programmer_ factor.
This is something that the aforementioned Maypole demo app definitely 
lacked (as anyone who tryed to move too far from the CRUD paradigm using 
Maypole quickly discovered).

> 
> Jules
> 
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-- 
Marcello Romani
Developer
Spin s.r.l.
Reggio Emilia
http://www.spinsoft.it