Odd flash of inspiration while washing up (yay for mindless activity) and also listening to a TED talk.
I often grumble at Moose. Though not actually at Moose itself, just at seemingly everyone and everything jumping on the bandwagon. I also want to use Reaction, cos Matt wrote/writes it, and from the outside it feels like a great idea.
But part of me doesn't think so. I think I know why now. Maybe I've been reading too many articles on Agile and so on. Specifically the principles of DoTheSimplestThingThatCouldPossiblyWork, and YouAintGonnaNeedIt.
Reaction is a complex piece of software, built on top of two other pieces of complex software, Catalyst, and Moose. That's a whole stack of code. As people jokingly say "It installs half of CPAN". Don't get me wrong, software re-use is good and if I actually needed a piece of software that does all the many things that these three do, I'd use them.
But I don't. Applications (and websites) don't often start complex, they gather complexity over time.
For one or two web pages, maybe even ten, I can write them by hand. Ok so I probably copy the header and footer after a few. When I come to write the eleventh one, this becomes tedious. So instead I could use something like Template Toolkit's ttree, to produce a bunch of pages out of some templates. At some point I find myself needing something dynamic, or the concept of users, then I may go fetch Catalyst.
And that's as far as I've got. Which step makes me need Reaction? The one where 90% of my website is interactive? I've not written too many of those, but the few I have, Catalyst has sufficed.
You're probably thinking now, that I just don't write the same kind of applications/websites as others do. Thats possibly true.
But again, Agile ways of doing things suggest we write the minimal amount of code we can get away with, to imlement the currently required features. That we don't plan ahead and add more code for potential features later, they will be re-thought anyway. That we release early, and often, and gather feedback for improvement, and then add new features.
Not forgetting to refactor. To upgrade, to replace the entire framework if needed.
I think, what I'm looking for is, a guide for newcomers to explain and help ths progression. How to upgrade your site or code, from a few pages, to some dynamic bits, to a full blown interactive site. Or even not, not every site wants or needs to go that far. Not all code needs to be able to use email.
There seem to exist many articles on how to write this complex code, but not enough that explain how to come to the conclusion that you need it.
Maybe this is also why there are still many many more people writing about how to do CGI scripts in Perl, than how to use Moose. The transition is missing.
(With thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing creativity)
Right, now I'm off to move the fledgling DBIx::Class website from some hand written pages to ttree.
@public,programming,perl,thinking
Last modified: 2009-05-25T00:22:35