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

[Jules Bean]

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.

Jules