[Catalyst] Catalyst vs Rails vs Django Cook off

Peter Edwards peter at dragonstaff.com
Mon Jan 15 12:26:39 GMT 2007


For businesses the cost-to-develop and cost-to-maintain are usually more
important than handler performance. 
The reason is that in most medium-large transactional web systems the
bottleneck is the database and not the framework.
A 10-100x slowdown in using an ORM or your framework of choice doesn't make
much difference in terms of end user perceived speed (assuming you serve
static content from a lightweight proxy web server). It does save a lot of
money in cost-to-maintain.

Sure there is a place for optimised libraries and so on, but it's only worth
optimising bottlenecks and the handler usually isn't one.
I recently had to hand-write a TCP/IP server in Perl using POE to handle one
particularly heavy case but most situations are easily dealt with by Apache
mod_perl or FastCGI, in fact running Perl in CGI mode is often adequate.

More important questions to me about frameworks are how:
- easy to learn
- quick to develop
- flexible
- comprehensive in terms of supporting infrastructure (templates,
components)
- easy/expensive to recruit staff
- easy to integrate with other systems

Realistic approaches include
.NET
J2EE
Catalyst, Jifty
RoR

They all have strengths/weaknesses.
For example, you'll get a Jifty or RoR app up quickly if you do it the
standard way. If you want to build a bigger system that doesn't quite fit
their model you're probably better off with Catalyst or another framework.
I did one large system with Catalyst last year and it was great for that.
I did a smaller system just before Christmas and wrote my own simple MVC
framework for convenience.
It's a question of choosing the right tool for the job.

Regards,
Peter Edwards
www.dragonstaff.com  Business IT Consultancy
-----Original Message-----
From: Hermida, Leandro [mailto:Leandro.Hermida at fmi.ch] 
Sent: 15 January 2007 09:30
To: The elegant MVC web framework
Subject: RE: [Catalyst] Catalyst vs Rails vs Django Cook off


> From: Carl Johnstone [mailto:catalyst at fadetoblack.me.uk] 
> Sent: Monday, January 15, 2007 10:21
> To: catalyst at lists.rawmode.org
> Subject: Re: [Catalyst] Catalyst vs Rails vs Django Cook off
> 
> 
> > Is it true that Catalyst is so slow comparing with other frameworks?
> 
> Does it matter?
> 
> If speed is so important, you should write your own custom 
> httpd that does exactly what you need in assembly language.
> 
> Carl

Speed does matter and I believe the original thread question is a valid
one.  Not everyone has the time or the know-how to do wheel reinvention
and write custom daemons (I know I don't).  That's why people write
kernels and libraries and abstraction of lower level things so that
others can build things on top.  Otherwise we would never get anything
done.







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