[Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development

bill hauck wbhauck at yahoo.com
Thu Feb 19 01:47:25 GMT 2009




--- On Wed, 2/18/09, Kieren Diment <diment at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Kieren Diment <diment at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development
> To: "The elegant MVC web framework" <catalyst at lists.scsys.co.uk>
> Date: Wednesday, February 18, 2009, 7:41 AM
> On 18/02/2009, at 5:55 PM, Dave Rolsky wrote:
> 
> > 
> > This is hardly unreasonable.
> > 
> > I've worked at a number of smaller shops where we
> were developing a Perl-based app. If a developer had decided
> that they wanted to throw together some important tool in
> Java (or Python or Haskell or Smalltalk or ...), that would
> have been problem.
> > 
> > The investment in a language is bigger than just the
> programmers, even. You have build & deployment tools,
> automated testing setups (you do, don't you? ;),
> sysadmin knowledge, packaging infrastructure, and so on.
> > 
> > Some of that may be language-agnostic, but often a lot
> of it ties into the language and its tools.
> > 
> > Once you've made that investment, it makes sense
> to stick with it. Just because Catalyst and Perl are great
> tools for webapps doesn't mean that they're the
> _right_ tool at your job.
> 
> Yes indeed.  To balance that, management also need to work
> with the idea that rules are not dogmatic but designed for
> practical purpose.  In my (academic - research and
> practical) experience, the larger the organisation, the more
> likely they are to believe dogma is more important than
> pragmatism, especially if you go through the official IT
> channels.  If you go through the unofficial channels this
> may change, depending on the structure of the organisation,
> and the quality of your unofficial channels.
> 

No, I totally understand that.  If the company is using Java, PHP, Python, etc. then the other projects should use the same language if possible.

Um, if by "automated testing" you mean sending an email to the crew and saying, "Ok, give it a try ..." then, yeah, we've got automated testing.

However, we don't really have Java developers for this project.  Sure, the company has lots of Java developers but none that are funded by us (corporate communications) and available.  We don't really have any funding for the project, either, so a contractor is out as well.  I proposed that we write the application in Perl using Catalyst since I know Perl pretty well and my system administrator needs to learn it since many utilities have been / will be written in Perl.  I guess I could learn Java, Servlets, and JSPs, but it'll take me a lot longer to write than in Perl.  And it'll be a whole lot less fun.

Cheers

bill


      



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