[Catalyst] BBC's "Perl on Rails" nuttiness

[J. Shirley]

On Dec 1, 2007 11:29 AM, Jonathan Rockway <jon at jrock.us> wrote:

>
> On Sun, 2007-12-02 at 02:50 +0900, Matt Rosin wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Low ball coming in. There's a story on slashdot.org today about how
> > the BBC has reinvented catalyst calling it "Perl on Rails" which is
> > actually being used in the BBC now they say. I'm mentioning it here
> > since it comes at a bad time what with the catalystframework domain
> > being locked up and the BBC person seems to be giving wierd reasons
> > for saying Catalyst or other perl MVC frameworks were unusable, see
> > below.
>
> I think that the 5.6 limitation was the main reason for not using
> Catalyst.
>

The insanity of a few of their points lead me to believe their Perl on Rails
platform is probably not ever going to go anywhere:
 - "we needed to expose any SQL queries we would make so they could be
vetted by DBA's for optimization"
 - "On the live environment we were told at the time we had Perl 5.6, and a
few BBC approved perl modules."

I certainly believe that _some_ SQL queries should be optimized, or rather
the database optimized for those queries, making every query that way is
just madness.  It certainly isn't extensible.

The best way to tie developers hands and waste money is by giving them an
immutable whitelist of modules.  I wonder how many "utility" methods are in
this framework that should be broken out into separate modules -- and in
reality, there are probably already 3 modules already doing their utility
method.  People really need to get over NIH-Syndrome.

There is another comment on the BBC article (
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.shtml) that is
even more worrisome about the state of getting Catalysts' name out in the
field more than what it is.  People are confusing MVC with CRUD frameworks,
and that's something that we should change.

"What were the reasons
- multi language support (33 languages support), find any MVC can do this
correctly.
- perl system (because most of the developers know Perl)
- syndicate content, rss feeds, 3rd party delivery, mobile content
- a friendly user interface for journalists/editors and producers.
- plus many other features..."

The first is a piece of cake... MVC shouldn't care about your encoding.
Having syndicated content is application structure and everything else could
be replaced with a question of, "Hi, could you explain the difference
between MVC, CRUD and CMS?"

I'm seeing this as an opportunity (hey, Peter Karman!) to get more word out
that Catalyst is the blocks you build a CRUD app or CMS with.  It is not a
CMS app... but neither is Rails.  And really, if we do get the word out we
still can't cure stupid so maybe it isn't worth it to focus on this angle.

-J



> Also, rails-style "MVC" really has nothing to do with Catalyst-style
> MVC.  TMTOWTDI.
>

MVC does not mean what they think it means.  *sigh*

(FSVO "they")
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