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

[Cory Watson]

On 4/28/06, Len Jaffe <lenjaffe at jaffesystems.com> wrote:
> I think that part of the attraction of RoR, (and to an
> extent Django, and Turbo Gears) is the fact that it
> provides for their users, the one true ORM and
> templating package. RoR goes beyond this and holds the
> developers hand with naming conventions every place
> possible.  I think that NOT having to make many of
> these decision is part of what is attractive to the
> lay person.

<snip>

I think that this discussion of both $TEMPLATE_PACKAGE and $ORM also
have something to do with the difficulties in installing Cat from
CPAN.

Catalyst is not a cookie cutter framework.

Our target audience is not necessarily someone who is cutting their
teeth with web development.  It seems to me that the users of Catalyst
are people who have experienced quite a few frameworks and have
decided that they don't want someone telling them they must use $ORM,
$TEMPLATE_PACKAGE or what have you.  We demand the high price of
install because the core devs have made the choice to leverage the
power of CPAN.

I came to Catalyst because I could use CDBI.  I eventually thought
better of it and switched to DBIC.  I might decide to tomorrow to use
a ORM I brew myself because I hate Matt... who knows.   The point is
that Cat makes this easy.  The cost is that there are choices to be
made.

If you want a framework that makes all the decisions for you and takes
all the control away perhaps you should use something else?

Note this isn't aimed at the mail I'm responding to, but more to the
idea that Cat should be 'easy'.  It's more aimed at the flamebait post
who wanted Cat to wipe his ass for him.  We should do all we can to
make this easy, but we shouldn't lie to people.  Programming isn't
tinkertoys, despite what some people want us to think. ;)

--
Cory 'G' Watson
http://www.onemogin.com