[Dbix-class] Re: Versioned Cluelessness

[Jerry Kaidor]

> On 28.07.2008, at 04:01, Christopher Laco wrote:
>> is not an appropriate answer for a new user or Catalyst or DBIC.
*** Hello,

   My name is Jerry Kaidor, and I'm a newbie....

For about a week, I've been giving a serious spare-time effort to learn
this catalyst/DBIC stuff ( BTW, what's the difference between DBIx and
DBIC? Is
DBIx just DBI - any-kind-of-X? ).

  I think I'm a fairly typical newbie.  I did systems programming for a
living for some twenty years.  I've written about 15K lines of Perl in
the past year or so, in my spare time.

   I've been writing some web-based tools for my business.  Been using
your basic CGI.pm and DBI, lots of print statements to get out the
HTML, hand-coded state machines for the screen-to-screen flow control,
utility files with all of the SQL stuff for each table.  There's very
little "magic" in this approach.  The control flow is easy to
understand: a page is activated, my program gets to compute for a
little while, then it shoots out an HTML page and exits.

   I hear that application development is faster with a framework.  OK,
how much faster?  Is it twice as fast?  Three times?  It looks like it
will take a couple months to really get up to speed with this stuff. 
In that same couple months, I could have coded and deployed a major
module "the old way".
Is it worth it?

   And what about debug?  Does all the magic make it hard to debug?  Or is
it just the usual - hard at the beginning, and then in a couple months
all the usual bugs become familiar old friends?

                          - Jerry Kaidor ( jerry at tr2.com )