[Catalyst] thoughts on a catalyst roadmap

Bill Moseley moseley at hank.org
Fri Oct 12 17:00:30 GMT 2012


On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 8:04 AM, John Napiorkowski <jjn1056 at yahoo.com>wrote:

>
>
> http://jjnapiorkowski.typepad.com/modern-perl/2012/10/thoughts-on-a-catal=
yst-roadmap-1.html
>


I tend to describe Catalyst as glorified dispatcher and object instance
manager.   The goal there is to make people think about thin controllers
and lots of models.   Controller bloat tends to happen if not careful.

Plugins are big, but looking at our apps we probably use more custom
plugins than CPAN ones.  Granted, mostly CPAN inspired but end up
customizing for our own needs.

Obviously, being able to easily hook into the request process is huge.

I agree with your thoughts about REST and web sockets.  Much (most?) of our
development is REST based.  I've written two REST replacement systems now
(Controller base class and Action class).  One is very similar to
Catalyst::Action::Rest, but much more heavy weight with CRUD and a bit of
magic built in, and another rather light weight based on chaining.

Views are becoming less important/interesting since more of that is
client-side and much is just returned as JSON.

Pain points I have are around scalability.   I'd like to have our "app" be
made up of many small apps because dev on a very large app can get slow.
Having separate apps isn't too hard, although it's a bit more of a pain for
rendering templates and sharing a standard layout across separate apps.

I've also been looking at ways to manage features -- or really a way to
control features dynamically.   In other words, all developers work adding
features in trunk and always release from trunk.  And have a way to
dynamically turn features on or off -- or on to just a sub-set of
accounts/IP addresses/etc.   That's mostly looking for ways to make the
build, test, release process less painful -- and less expensive.   And
releases more frequent and less anxious.



-- =

Bill Moseley
moseley at hank.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/pipermail/catalyst/attachments/20121012/1b1a7=
2fc/attachment.htm


More information about the Catalyst mailing list