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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 another look and go “ah, I see why I want all these features now: I’d've written half as much code since I thought I didn’t need all Catalyst features”. Similarly the wow moment is usually three months or six months into a project, when you realise that adding features is still going quickly because the code’s naturally shaken out into a sensible structure
So, there’s quite a bit of learning, and it’s pretty easy for it to look like overkill if you haven’t already experienced the pain involved. It’s a lot like the use strict problem writ large – declaring variables with my inappropriate scopes rather than making it up as you go along is more thinking and more effort to begin with, so it’s not always easy to get across that it’s worth it until the prospective user has had blue daemons fly out of his nose a couple of times from mistakes a more structured approach would’ve avoided.
Full interview on Josettorama
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 another look and go “ah, I see why I want all these features now: I’d've written half as much code since I thought I didn’t need all Catalyst features”. Similarly the wow moment is usually three months or six months into a project, when you realise that adding features is still going quickly because the code’s naturally shaken out into a sensible structure
So, there’s quite a bit of learning, and it’s pretty easy for it to look like overkill if you haven’t already experienced the pain involved. It’s a lot like the use strict problem writ large – declaring variables with my inappropriate scopes rather than making it up as you go along is more thinking and more effort to begin with, so it’s not always easy to get across that it’s worth it until the prospective user has had blue daemons fly out of his nose a couple of times from mistakes a more structured approach would’ve avoided.
Full interview on Josettorama
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