[Catalyst] Starting development

[A. Pagaltzis]

* Peter Karman <peter at peknet.com> [2006-04-27 20:40]:
> Not using an ORM leaves out the M from the MVC (Model, View,
> Controller) framework that Catalyst uses, which leaves you View
> and Controller. Those two are where all the fun stuff happens
> anyway. :)
> 
> Don't get hung up on the whole "which ORM do I use" thing at
> first. You can use DBI and straight SQL all you want. What
> Catalyst does is encourage you to think differently (if, like
> me, you don't know much about MVC, then read up on that a
> little first). After you get your feet wet with an app or two,
> then you can start to inject some Model stuff in there.

Oh dear, so many misconceptions. :-(

Using an ORM and doing MVC are pretty much orthogonal. MVC is an
approach for distributing responsibilities in your code. An ORM
creates a manifestation of a database schema as a class library,
roughly speaking. Now, an ORM can perform the duties of a (pretty
shallow) Model, but that doesn’t mean the Model has to be an ORM.

In fact, MVC is a design pattern for GUI apps, which work very
differently from web apps, so there are a lot of question on
whether and how the MVC pattern applies to web apps at all. Cf.
Andy Wardley’s article

    MVC: No Silver Bullet
    http://wardley.org/computers/web/mvc.html

and the comments on my journal entry about it:

    http://use.perl.org/~Aristotle/journal/29291

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>