[Catalyst] Fwd: mvc frameworks in perl

[Matt S Trout]

Chris wrote:
> Hi Matt,
> 
>> (although at the moment we're currently busy refactoring stuff and
>> stealing the best bits of Jifty :)
>>
> 
> Which bits are you stealing? I'm debating whether to stick with
> catalyst or try jifty for a new project. Hints on what might appear in
> catalyst would be useful.

I guess it depends. If you're looking for something that allows fast 
bootstrap of an application-centric system (i.e. your database is really 
just the datastore for your application and the most important thing is 
the web interface on the front) and a One True Way to do things, Jifty 
is potentially useful. Catalyst's emphasis is much more on flexibility 
and "doing things the way that suits the architecture of your app"; if 
you need to integrate with the outside world, existing databases etc. 
Jifty really can't compete. I also strongly suspect that Catalyst will 
scale to large application design much more easily than Jifty will, but 
that's merely a suspiscion since nobody's got that far with Jifty yet.

In Jesse's recent perlcast, he commented that every Catalyst application 
is "a beautiful and unique snowflake" and that he considers that a bad 
thing. I'd beg to differ :)

> Jifty::DBI::Schema?

DBIx::Class already has the ability to deploy schemas; versioning is 
being worked on but is taking time since we're intending to roll it out 
for all supported databases, which is rather more than for Jifty::DBI.

In the meantime a DIY approach using the sqlt-diff utility (a 
super-powered version of whose code will be powerinf DBIC's versioning 
support) works extremely well (I've been using this approach to manage 
database maintainance and upgrades since before I ever knew Catalyst 
existed, let alone the beginning of the DBIx::Class project - though 
that system used an XML spec file to generate Class::DBI classes and an 
SQL DDL file)

> Halos?

Perhaps, but that'd be a little more complex for Catalyst since we have 
a far more flexible view model - Jifty supports only HTML::Mason 
currently and owns your form rendering, which makes their job rather 
easier in this direction.

> etc?

Catalyst::Plugin::Continuation

http://search.cpan.org/~nuffin/Catalyst-Plugin-Continuation-0.01/lib/Catalyst/Plugin/Continuation.pm