* On Fri, Dec 04 2009, David Cantrell wrote: > On Fri, Dec 04, 2009 at 10:21:35AM -0600, Dave Rolsky wrote: >> On Fri, 4 Dec 2009, Rene Schickbauer wrote: >> >On the other hand, i knew my way around HTML, the Template engine and >> >HTTP::Server::Simple(::CGI). Got the project up&running in two weeks >> >straight (90% of the code was a fixed up perl port of one old C++ business >> >logic code). >> The idea that you couldn't learn the basics of Catalyst and get things >> running in the same time seems unlikely. > > There's a very big difference between learning the basics of Catalyst > and learning enough to do any real work. I've been working as one of > several programmers for the last six months on a large product that > uses Catalyst. I still have to ask people for help whenever I hit > Catalyst.
I remember a few years ago, as a newbie with only CGI.pm and mod_perl experience, discovering the Catalyst website. I thought I liked what I saw, and decided to play with it for a bit. My toy blog project (a very early version of Angerwhale, incidentally) was converted from a mod_perl handler in a weekend, and my $WORK_APP was converted from straight CGI.pm in a few days. Now I didn't need Apache anymore, and my code was no longer a complete mess. (It was still very much a mess, of course, but improvement is always good.) This, coming from 0 experience with MVC and OO Perl, and nothing but the website for guidance. Today, there are two full-length books, 480 CPAN distributions, several tutorials, a full manual, and four years worth of blog posts and conference talks. If this isn't enough, you can pay many people to come to your office and teach you Catalyst; or, you can pay them to just start your app for you. If I could learn Catalyst from nothing but a basic overview of the framework and a tiny sample app, I would find it hard to believe anyone that is capable enough to write their own web framework would be unable to learn Catalyst fairly quickly today. It's one of the most well-travelled paths in the Perl Universe, and there are plenty of people that can help you if you have a problem. (See my philosophical talk on this: http://jrock.us/why-i-stick-with-perl.esl) (If you can write an entire web framework faster than you can get started with Catalyst, that is amazing. It has taken me more than 2 years of work just to get an idea of what a successor to Catalyst would look like, and I still haven't accounted for all the reuse patterns that Catalyst *already* provides. If you can design and implement something better... AND your application, in two weeks, that is incredible and unprecedented!) Finally... I have taught a few multi-day Catalyst classes. I have found that people tend to "get" Catalyst very quickly, even coming from non-web or non-OO-Perl backgrounds. I would like to say that's because I'm an awesome teacher, but my teaching style is probably an *impediment* to learning anything. Catalyst is just not that hard to learn. > And I keep finding things in Catalyst that look just plain stupid and > wrong. Hmm, I didn't seem to receive the patches you sent. Could you please resend them? (Shockingly, the goal of the Catalyst project is to keep all existing apps working, while removing the stupid and wrong parts of the framework. This is quite difficult, but Catalyst does fairly well here. It's not much different from Perl5 itself, actually...) Anyway, the community solution may not always be perfect... but it is a good stand in until you have the 10 spare years to rewrite it correctly. Regards, Jonathan Rockway -- print just => another => perl => hacker => if $,=$"
