[Dahut-pm] questions about Catalyst

[chris@prather.org]

> Hi,
>
> has anyone here looked into Catalyst? I toyed a bit with it this
> week-end and it seems quite nice, and in line with a bunch of stuff that
> this gang's been interested in.
>
> So I've been wondering, have there been any thoughts along the lines of
> porting/merging SAWA to/into it? And then just have AxKit2 run on top of
> it?
>
> It has all sorts of goodies about it (the least of which isn't the fact
> that it runs on many servers, and it has this really neat built-in
> server you can use for development -- getting the Hello World app up and
> running took all of two minutes) and it looks like everything AxKit and
> SAWA need are there, modulo the XML goodness.
>
> Thoughts?

I've looked at the documentation for Catalyst. I haven't gone so far as to
actually install anything yet.

The thing that caught me was their use of helper scripts to automate
building common functions. I've contemplated going about and doing this
with SAWA. I originally looked at Maypole and how to integrate it with
SAWA, but it did way too much Magic for me to feel comfortable, and when
all was said and done it was CRUD only and that didn't seem right either.
Catalyst sets a much nicer bar, so perhaps I'll explore it some more when
I get back to thinking about SAWA hacking.

Kip has some really neat koolaid he's been talking about that he wrote for
$dayjob that builds SAWA apps in via a GUI, and Jim Smith has his XML
language for writing statemachines that Kip and I were drooling over for
SAWA. Out of Kip's $dayjob stuff came the RDF::Helper which seems to make
dealing with RDF much more perlish (I'm planning on porting Bender to it
RealSoonNow(TM)).

I'd certainly like to see some more exploration of AxKit2 as a SAWA
application in the future, but I understand that the first person thinking
about it is dead busy with work-related things ... and the rest of us are
not up to snuff on one of the two systems.

-Chris