[Catalyst] RFC for Catalyst enabled GWT clone

[Nilson Santos Figueiredo Junior]

On 12/29/06, John Napiorkowski <jjn1056 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> So I guess my question is would people like a GWT like
> system for Catalyst and if so what would you like to
> see in it?

I've been thinking a lot about these sort of things lately but I
couldn't come up with a clean way to do it the way I envisioned it.

I think one of the most relevant concepts of these toolkits such as
GWT is the ability to have everything represented as widgets. I don't
know if it's just me but I've always failed when trying to to cleanly
code real widgets using the Catalyst + TT + DBIC combo. I always ended
up with something that violated MVC (or was just plain ugly). Either I
had lots of TT code that talked directly to the model or I had view
logic leaked into my controllers.

But then, maybe I'm just too picky or simply unable to think of an
obvious good way to do it.

> Then on particular pages you can use the GWT concept
> of widges to create models to represent bundles of
> functional and have a TT template to convert that into
> something meaningful.  I'd like to see this renderer
> bundled with a good Javascript library like Jquery to
> make it more easy to create dynamic controls.

Hmmm... I've never thought of it from this angle (i.e. having the
widgets as models which would then be rendered by TT). Maybe that's
the obvious way of doing it I would've never thought of because I
primarily associate models with data.

> Anyway I have a whole pile of fake-code around playing
> with the idea but nothing firmed up yet.

Anything publishable? Maybe looking at some (pseudo) code that
demonstrates how you envision it working could make your ideas clearer
to everyone. But either way it is, I think it might be great addition
to Catalyst. Even if Reaction is around and there is some
functionality overlap, having alternatives can be a good thing.

-Nilson Santos F. Jr.