Evaluating Catalyst and other frameworks

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

I have spent some time looking at Catalyst to see what would be
required to make LedgerSMB run according to current development
approaches (close to the db, etc) and the result isn't easy.
Basically, at a minimum, the following would need to be ported:

1)  Our model
2)  Authentication handlers and session handlers
3)  While HTML templates could use appropriate Catalyst classes,
LaTeX-based views would need to be ported....  Similarly plaint text
templates might or might not be able to be handled directly.
4)  Printing directly to a printer would require subclassing existing views....

I don't see this being simpler on any other framework unless it
supports the sort of stuff we're doing and that would be unusual.

My recommendation at this point is getting stronger:  Release a basic
framework ourselves and then facilitate ports of these relevant
components to other frameworks.  I don't see a lot of short-term gains
from moving to an MVC framework where we have to write our own model
handlers, some of our own view handlers, and so forth.  However, even
having the first two areas (session/auth/model interface) working on a
framework would open that framework up for use in creating addons,
etc.....  Of course if everyone decides that one of the frameworks is
the best way to go, then we can switch the primary implementation at
that time and leave the current approach as a reference
implementation.

Does this sound about right?

Best Wishes,
Chris travers