[Catalyst] Instant CRUD with DBIC::Schema

[Kieren Diment]

On 12 Mar 2008, at 21:50, Zbigniew Lukasiak wrote:

> After some more playing with CatalystX::CRUD I think I can formulate
> my arguments a bit more clearly.
>

OK, bear in mind that you're competing with Reaction here.  Reaction  
has some promise, but its development is slow so far (for casual  
users anyway), and it may suffer from some of the hyperverbosity  and/ 
or (superficially) excessive indirection that is endemic in  
enterprise ready™ software. I'm not qualified to comment further on  
this.


> I believe the objects that users of CatalystX::CRUD get in their
> controller should be the real things - i.e. objects from their models
> not CatalystX::CRUD::Model::Objects.  This would be the  minimal
> interface and minimal hassle for injecting CatalystX::CRUD::Controller
> actions to a legacy Catalyst controller.
>

What I particularly like about InstantCRUD is that everything is  
spelled out nicely for the coder once they run the helper.  That is,  
mostly once you've been through the catalyst learning curve, the  
instantcrud learning curve isn't very much more at all.   
InstantCRUD's main problem is HTML::Widget, and secondarily the lack  
of many-to-many introspection.  I'm not sure how big the problem with  
the tight coupling with DBIC is - I'd like to see a shitfight between  
merlyn and mst, with zby as mediator to straighten that one out.  Or  
maybe between merlyn and zby with mst mediating ...

I think it would be best  to be able to treat a CatalystX::CRUD  
application like any other catalyst application.  That is, minimal  
modification of $c->model('Foo') compared to an ordinary catalyst app  
so that the CRUD generator mostly gets out of the way.

For bonus points I'd like to see a REST service available by default,  
with a browser based service available on top of this.  This way we  
get the API for free and the browser UI  gets to forward to the REST  
API (with suitable massaging of the stash).