[Catalyst] Why Catalyst instead of Ruby on Rails?

radium radium at gmail.com
Sat Nov 12 08:33:56 CET 2005


>
> Second, are there "success stories" for Catalyst that one can point to
> to demonstrate it's scalability and flexibility?
>
>
I do all the tech stuff for what is currently the seventh largest discussion
forums according to http://www.big-boards.com. We host over 30,000,000 posts
served by a cluster of nine servers that push about 80mbit a day total. This
is all sadly on PHP right now, and I am in the process of writing new
software (called Titan) to replace it. It is entirely based on Catalyst and
ab benchmarks of my development code are running well over 20X faster than
the PHP equivalent. When this is complete, I hope to have one of the largest
Catalyst-driven sites to date.

If you plan to use Catalyst with mod_perl, there's plenty of data out there
to prove its scalability. I can't speak on Ruby's performance in
high-traffic web environments, but I'm waiting to see more people using it
before I'll take it seriously in that regard. Hopefully this happens.

Catalyst is extremely flexible. Basically I am using Catalyst for its
controller; I use NONE of the provided model, view, or plugin classes at
all. Catalyst doesn't care. You can also override most parts of the engine
(I built custom session and user authentication in, and rehauled the error
handling entirely). All this has let me keep things as fast as possible, and
if I ever need to break away from Catalyst, it's not so painful.

How efficient your application will be is up to you - there's lots of
"would-be-useful" things on CPAN, but ALWAYS look at the source and make
sure you aren't better off rolling your own.

My advice would be to at least devote some time to learning Catalyst -
you'll soon fall in love with it. For me, it's an escape from a long PHP
nightmare, so it's been especially wonderful. :)
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