in reply to Re^2: Review: CGI::Prototype
in thread Review: CGI::Prototype

When you have time, please elaborate on this statement.
Well, here's my bottom line on that.

When I looked at CGI::Application, I concluded what I've already said. And then I went off to commit time to make my own framework.

Since I already have CGI::Prototype in development and deployed at a few customer sites, it's not likely that anything I say now will want me to jump back over to some future version of CGI::Application. Not gonna happen.

If you're developing CGI::Application, feel free to steal ideas as you are inspired to do so by CGI::Prototype's design, but any hour I spend working out the differences between the two is an hour I'm not able to bill to my customers to develop the framework they've chosen on my suggestion.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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Re^4: Review: CGI::Prototype
by Purdy (Hermit) on Dec 02, 2004 at 17:12 UTC

    I got some XP/karma to burn ... ;)

    There seem to be a lot of I's and selfishness in this approach (and post). Instead of committing time to improving cgiapp, you decided to re-invent the wheel. Why? The cgiapp community would have gladly accepted your input!

    Now you're immersed into your framework and deem it better than cgiapp, which will carry a lot of weight, given who you are. You've also "locked in" some of your clients, which is fine & dandy for you, especially job-security-wise. But I gotta think this is harmful overall to the spirit of Open Source if there are numerous wheels to the same solution.

    This whole thing just comes off to me as a I-know-better-than-you kinda thing.

[reply]
      In this case, it is a he-knows-better-than-us thing. He knew better than us (and the C::A people) what job he needed to accomplish, he looked at C::A, decided that it didn't do precisely what he wanted, looked at the code, decided that it would take too much work to make it do what he wanted, so he wrote his own because he had to get the job done, which is ultimately the controlling factor here. If this was just an open-source, on-the-side project, I might agree with you more, but I think we can all agree that merlyn being able to afford food is a Good Thing.

      You think that having numerous wheels is bad for open source? Would open source be better off if Linus Torvalds had decided to work on HURD or BSD rather than writing Linux? Having multiple wheels is a good thing, if only because you can take a look at what was good about the old wheels and build them into your new one.

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