[Catalyst] template design issue: varibales stand-alone components

J. Shirley jshirley at gmail.com
Thu Feb 5 01:22:02 GMT 2009


On Wed, Feb 4, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Malcolm
<mjh-lists-catalyst at liminalflux.net> wrote:
> On Wednesday 04 February 2009, Gene Selkov wrote:
>
>> I understood as much. The problem I am grappling with is the complexity of
>> the web pages I have to present, with many different states and
>> transitions. There is no way I can code for that with a single template.
>>
>> I am used to the idea that I can have a parent template (autohandler in
>> Mason), which provides basic navigation and status display for the site;
>
> Is there any reason for not using Mason? I've been using it with Catalyst
> without any problems.
>

I think it is almost like using Emacs as a text editor, versus vi.
Emacs users espouse the amazing features and customization, while vi
users just sit down and write code because they're using an inferior
editor (I use vi.)

You already have a framework, so why use Mason?

Mason's dhandlers and autohandlers are some of its better features,
but they're not really designed to work in conjunction with Catalyst
(you can still use them, but... probably more work than you would get
unless you had specific goals to reach.)

If you simply think of templating languages, I find that Mason's
distinguishing advantages disappear if you -only- use is as a
templating language.

So, it boils down to: Do you know Mason well enough to get the most
out of it, while still designing your Catalyst application concisely
and in an abstract fashion?  If not, probably best to use TT, which is
simpler and offers some really neat features that seem to favor better
Catalyst applications (WRAPPER, most notably).

Hope that helps, and I can avoid any flamewars :)



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