[Catalyst] What a waste of time

[Brandon Black]

On 4/26/06, rails coder <railscoder at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dear Unsuspecting catalyst newbie,
>
>   Think twice before continuing.
>

What a great troll.  I'll stab at a few items though.

>  I tried to install catalyst:
>
>   - several tens of perl modules
>   - perl modules with circular version dependencies
>   - perl modules which won't install without force
>
>   => took a long time and was difficult. I'd rather spend the time
> scratching my ass.
>

CatInABox if you can't do it for yourself.

>
>  I tried to use catalyst:
>
>   - lack of accurate and useful documentation is amazing
>   - lack of simple examples such as form building and validation is
> unacceptable
>
>   => catalyst is "consulting ware", which is why the developers refuse to
> document it in a usable manner
>

I take serious issue with this.  The docs could be improved, sure, but
the bottom line is that Catalyst is a fairly complex framework, and it
has to be.  You can't easily provide this kind of power and
flexibility (which rails has neither of) and still keep things simple
enough for some joe who's not a very good coder and/or has no web
applications experience.

The difference between Catalyst and Rails on this is like the
difference between a large-scale industrial machine shop and a
screwdriver.

If you don't belong in a machine-shop, and you have a machine-shop
level task to accomplish, then yes, you're going to need someone to
help you, "consultant" or otherwise.

If your task is simple enough that it can be done with screwdriver, by
all means, stay out of the machine shop, it's not worth the trouble. 
Unless of course you might want to build bigger things later without
starting over from scratch, in which case you might consider going the
industrial route from the get-go.

[... a bunch of crap omitted that I'm sure others will respond to,
mostly about how great rails is ...]

>
>  My advice: Don't mess with trying to install and learn to use catalyst,
> unless your time has no value and you have lots of it to waste. Get Ruby on
> Rails.
>

My advice: Don't waste your time trolling internet message boards in
an attempt to "enlighten" people with your viewpoint.  It's not like
Cat developers are unaware of Rails.  If anything the opposite is more
likely to be true, in that Rails developers on the whole could use
some enlightening as to the very existence of Cat.

My time has a whole lot of value, and over the course of my most
recent project (a bit over a year of full-time development for me - so
we're not talking about the "8 hours to develop", cookie-cutter,
redundant, simplistic web-apps that Rails is good at), Catalyst has
saved me a whole lot of time and pain.

Catalyst has left me the freedom to use whatever tools I see fit,
where I see fit, in a manner that's completely custom to my
application alone.  My time spent on web interface work would have
easily been 2-3 times longer going the "manual" route without a
framework at all, and something like Rails wouldn't even be capable of
the kind of flexibility and power that I need.

-- Brandon