[Catalyst] Catalyst mentioned as technology alternative

Alan Humphrey alan.humphrey at comcast.net
Thu Jan 4 16:07:12 GMT 2007


Thought the list would be interested in this:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/1/3/182756/0971

Short story - Dailykos (prominent left-wing blog in the US) is planning to
rewrite its back end and they're discussing language alternatives.  Perl,
Ruby, and Python are in the running.  Once the language is determined then a
framework needs to be selected.  From the article:

"Core web framework is dictated by language choice, and vice versa. If
you're using Ruby, you're almost certainly using Ruby on Rails. If you're
using Python, you might be using Django or Zope. If you're using Perl,
you're using mod_perl, maybe with one of the higher level frameworks
available from CPAN that build on top of it (Catalyst, Mason, etc.)

"So, which is better? Anyone use more than one of them and have a real-world
opinion?

"To prime the pump, I'll say I'm nervous about trying to do this site on
Rails: I have little information on how well it will scale, and I'm not
certain how many of their most-hyped features we'd just be immediately
working around anyway (like their data abstraction stuff). These two
concerns also apply to dozens upon dozens of other framework engines --
pretty much all of them, in fact, to one extent or another.

"Note that we've actually got rather specific technical requirements, here,
and they revolve almost exclusively around speed. The number of primary
"pages" on Daily Kos is very few -- the frontpage, story page, etc. But
they're always in memory, they're always changing, and they get hammered
hard. Optimizing that behavior is far more important than prototyping them
quickly."


See the link for the full story and the thread.

- Alan






More information about the Catalyst mailing list