[Catalyst] Is Catalyst large enough to sustain a book?

[Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior]

On 4/28/06, Yuval Kogman <nothingmuch at woobling.org> wrote:
> That's DBIC's job - while it can be coverred e.g. under a hybrid
> Catalyst and DBIx::Class book, a Catalyst book on it's own should
> not really consider this a show stopper.

You see, that's one of the issues. Frameworks should be consistent. A
Catalyst book should adhere to a single ORM. Of course it should also
state that Catalyst is flexible and that other ORMs are available,
etc.

> HTML::Prototype is a direct port of the rails api - which sucks.

It's not a direct port. Not everything is available and in TT you
still have to do something like p.method() instead of just method().

> Frankly, I think Prototype/scriptaculous kinda sucks, after having
> used it - it's fun, till it has to scale a bit more.

I disagree.
I think Prototype is an absolute must-have for every JavaScript-heavy
site nowadays. In JavaScript world, Prototype is the best thing that
ever happened since sliced bread.

Scriptaculous is a nice library built on top of Prototype. I mainly
use it for the Effects library and some other neat extensions. But,
although not awesome, it's far from sucking.

> Usually code generation is fun but then limiting - which is expected
> and OK (since after all you are writing in  a pretty high level
> programming language), but the moment that you start doing prototype
> "by hand" it's weaknesses start to show their ugly head.

Hmm... I must be somewhat unware of these things, because I've never
seen JS code generation. Unless you mean that evaled <script></script>
weirdness of Rails (which, although weird, can be useful, but is not
ideal).

> This is as ready as it will be without real continuations in Perl,
> and it's really a small feature.

It's a small but really, really nice feature. Not a paragon of
maintainability for traditional applications, but great for speeding
up small tasks. And you're coding an AJAX application these sure do
add up.

It's somewhat analogous to that "flash" RoR thingy, which
C::P::Session borrowed. It seems completely useless and idiotic, until
you start using it. It simplifies small, day-to-day annoyances.

-Nilson Santos F. Jr.