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

[Tomas Doran]

On 19 Feb 2009, at 20:07, Matt Pitts wrote:

>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Dave Rolsky [mailto:autarch at urth.org]
>> Sent: Thursday, February 19, 2009 2:21 PM
>> To: The elegant MVC web framework
>> Subject: RE: [Catalyst] RFC: The paradox of choice in web development
>>
>> On Thu, 19 Feb 2009, Matt Pitts wrote:
>>
>>> I myself am currently trying to support multiple developers (content
>> &
>>> perl) working on a Catalyst app from Windows desktops and it's been
> a
<snip>
>> Getting _way_ off-topic, but if your target environment is Linux,  
>> this
>> is
>> insane. VMWare is easy to set up and would let your Windows developer
>> run
>> the app in something much closer to its target environment.
>
> Thanks for the input...
>
> VMs were considered as an option, but since the Windows folks aren't
> Linux-savvy, this means even more systems I have to maintain, perl  
> CPAN,
> updates, etc.

Where are you finding perl programmers from who can't use ubuntu?

Also, how does having people building software for a platform they're  
unfamiliar with work for you?

> Not to mention the system resources used by the VM which
> could be quite taxing on some of our developers' systems. For me, this
> was the insane option.

I'm sorry, but if you're not prepared to buy your developers  
reasonable workstations then you've already lost - it doesn't take  
much effort to do a cost/benefit analysis and the cost of developing  
on a platform which (a) is causing you pain, and (b) is nothing like  
your production environment.

This cost cannot be trivial even with the simple factors, and even  
higher once you factor less easy to analyze things such as the  
additional risk of your software having had less testing an the  
correct environment, and the staff motiviation as developing your  
application sounds painful.

How many days of lost time/work is the cost of a reasonable  
workstation? 2, 3? Less than a week certainly..

The highest cost to a knowledge based organisation is human  
resources, and so not providing your people the right kit to do their  
jobs effectively is just cutting your own throat.

> In reality, two of the devs _are_ currently running the app on  
> Linux, in
> their $HOME on a shared DEV server, and using Samba to access their
> $HOME from windows. This setup has its own issues that I won't go  
> into.

Shared dev servers are fail to start with for a number of reasons -  
each developer needs their own environment they can mess up as they  
wish.

That aside, I don't see why there is any need to share a home  
directory between where you're developing and where your workstation  
is - all your code is in revision control, right? I suppose you'd  
want this if you used a graphical editor, but remote X works nicely  
in cygwin, so that could theoretically be a solution (other than the  
fact that having several people run a desktop environment on the same  
box is going to suck pretty quickly).

I'd recommend having a 'standard' development vmware rig which people  
can download, use, trash (and delete / get another one when they  
trash) isn't any more effort to setup than 1 new machine +  
development environment.

Keeping it up to date after that is again keeping 1 machine up to date.

Don't worry about the individual workstations, they're disposable  
(and developers should be able to say sudo apt-get upgrade or  
equivalent).. Again, if you _can't_ get your development environment  
down to this level of isolation, then something is horribly, horribly  
wrong somewhere..

> Anyway, this is a long story, I'll stop ranting. My point was just  
> that
> there is no easy way to "just run" the Cat app in Windows.

I do feel your pain, but I think that's down to the modules you're  
using in your application, rather than Catalyst itself (which as many  
people will attest, installs and runs fine on windows).

Cheers
t0m