PERL,INGRES,PROGRAMMING

This book's subtitle  "130 Programs That Get Things Done" tells us exactly what to expect. Is it a good addition to your bookshelf? Full review on i-programmer

What about the other Perl frameworks, Dancer and Mojolicious? How do they compare to Catalyst? Dancer’s big strength is making things quick and easy for smaller apps; you don’t have to think in terms of OO unless you want to and plugins generally shove a bunch of extra keywords into your namespace that are connected to global or per-request variables. Where Catalyst doesn’t have an exact opinion about a lot of the structure of your code but very definitely insists that you pick one and implement it, Dancer basically lets you do whatever you like and not really think too much about it . That really isn’t meant as a criticism: somewhere along the line I picked up a commit bit to Dancer as well and they’ve achieved some really good things – providing something that’s as little conceptual overhead as possible for smaller apps, and something where there’s a very direct mapping between the concepts involved and what’s actually going to happen in terms of request dispatc...

Does all that flexibility come at a price? The key price is that while there are common ways to do things, you’re rarely going to find One True Way to solve any given problem. It’s more likely to be “here’s half a dozen perfectly reasonable ways, which one is best probably depends on what the rest of your code looks like”, plus while there’s generally not much integration specific code involved, everything else is a little more DIY than most frameworks seem to require. I can put together a catalyst app that does something at least vaguely interesting in a couple hours, but doing the sort of 5 minute wow moment thing that intro screencasts and marketing copy seem to aim for just doesn’t happen, and often when people first approach catalyst they tend to get a bit overwhelmed by the various features and the way you can put them together. There’s a reflex of “this is too much, I don’t need this!”. But then a fair percentage of them come back two or three years later, have ...

We talk to Matt S. Trout, technical team leader at consulting firm Shadowcat Systems Limited, creator of the DBIx::Class ORM and of many other CPAN modules, and of course co-maintainer of the Catalyst web framework. These are some of his activities, but for this interview we are interested in Matt’s work with Catalyst. Our discussion turned out not to be just about Catalyst though. While discussing the virtues of the framework, we learned, in Matt’s own colourful language, what makes other popular web frameworks tick, managed to bring the consultant out of him who shared invaluable thoughts on architecting software as well as on the possibility of Perl 6 someday replacing Perl 5 for web development. We concluded that there’s no framework that wins by knockout, but that the game’s winner will be decided on points, points given by the final judge, your needs. Full interview on Josettorama