Re: Evaluating Catalyst and other frameworks

["Roderick A. Anderson" <..hidden..>]

Chris Travers wrote:
> Hi all;

Catalyst fan here though it has been awhile since I did any actual coding.

I've been avoiding the discussion up to now since it was mostly heading 
in (my idea of) the correct direction.  :-)  Since I want to help and 
being in at the beginning, verses reverse knowledge engineering, is 
easier I'm chiming in now.

> 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

Current model or _planned_ "thick" model. (Not sure what the proper term 
is for what is proposed, ie. everything model and generic business-rule 
wise that will fit and work in the database.)

If you're thinking of getting the current model into Catalyst then there 
would be some _work_ to do!

If the new model then designing and creating it will be choke point.

> 2)  Authentication handlers and session handlers

There are some excellent tools for this that are available for 
"Catalyst" already.

> 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.

I thought LSMB was using TT already.  Should be very minor/few changes 
make them work.

> 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.

OK. I guess you're thinking of doing this for 1.3+.  All Catalyst 
related comments above should be nullified for now.  :-)


\\||/
Rod
--
> 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
>
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