James A. wrote:
the deep, deep waters of CPAN. One of the advantages of Rails over
works.
I think it’s a bit more remarkable than that. The parts for a PC conform
to interfaces which are understood across an industry, whereas my
impression is that Catalyst allows integration of components that were
defined in the absence of agreed interfaces.
So far as the choice is concerned, if all you have is Catalyst and CPAN,
then you are right, but that combination provides an opportunity for
other people to provide the ‘distro’. I don’t know if that’s happening
with Catalyst, but AppFuse is an example in the Java world. (And the
need to choose is a big difference between the Java world and the .NET
world.)
That said, i know nothing of the Perl library, and if you knew the
dark incantations necessary to summon your carefully-chosen demons
from the CPAN realm, then I can imagine there’s a certain pleasure in
that.
I imagine so - I’m not a Perl hacker myself. I would like a web
application framework with the expressiveness of Rails and a lot more
pluggability of components. I am only using Rails for prototyping at the
moment - most of what my customers need is a little way off the Rails
‘golden path’. I’m looking forward to when JRuby both performs well and
has all the functionality required by Rails.
It also might be worth noting that the components we were talking
about in this particular thread where application-level, rather than
framework level…
Well, there’s a lot of stuff that DHH considers to be application-level
that I am used to seeing architectural support for, so I don’t think
that there is a hard distinction there. The application/architecture
boundary is pretty context-dependent (where context includes people and
organisation structure, as well as business requirements - it’s a
well-known observation that architectures reflect the structure of the
organisations that produced them).
Catalyst has pluggable support for authentication and authorisation,
which is stuff that DHH regards as inappropriate for the core of Rails.
I’d like Rails to take the same approach as Catalyst - define the
plug-in points, and let other people provide the options to plug in.
Thanks for an interesting reply - I’ve had to think quite a lot while
responding, and have thrown away as much text as I ended up with.
Justin
P.S. Have you watched the Snakes and Rubies videos? It’s well worth it.