ait has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi,

I tried PageKit and liked it very much. I am a bit conserned of the Ricoh license [1],.

Then I looked at Maypole and plan to test it tonight. It looks very interesting as well.

If you were going to start a long-term and scalable [2] project, which framework would _you_ choose and why? Do you know of any others I can look at?


Thanks!

[1] I guess mainly because of ignorance, because I've never worked with this license. I read it, it looks ok, but you never know.

[2] The use of the word scalable is both for scalable in the number users, but I am mainly concerned in the maintenenace of the code: how well can the code scale?

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Maypole or PageKit?
by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Aug 19, 2005 at 18:28 UTC
    Catalyst, hands down. It's simple, extensible, and just does a lot of the crap for you. The community is amazingly supportive and willing to accept patches. There's good tutorials and documentation writers are welcome. The code is easy to read (for those who like doing that).

    And, it's Simon Cozen's choice as successor to Maypole.

    My criteria for good software:
    1. Does it work?
    2. Can someone else come in, make a change, and be reasonably certain no bugs were introduced?
[reply]
      ... it's Simon Cozen's choice as successor to Maypole.

      As far as I know, Simon still works with Maypole (though he's not the maintainer anymore) and had sharp disagreements with the design of Catalyst. I wouldn't mind seeing his thoughts on Catalyst if he's changed his mind though.

[reply]
      The community is amazingly supportive because Catalyst, like Maypole, needs a lot of work. Documentation writers are welcome indeed.
[reply]
        What do you mean with "needs a lot of work"?
        The Framework itself is quite mature, and there is naturally never enough documentation. :)
[reply]
Re: Maypole or PageKit?
by astroboy (Chaplain) on Aug 19, 2005 at 19:54 UTC

    Catalyst is much more advanced down the development path than Maypole, but personally, I prefer CGI::Appplication because it's easier to learn, but the sheer volume of plugins being added in the last few months gives you a level of functionality on a par with Catalyst.

    Catalyst has a steep learning curve IMHO, which is not helped by the documentation which seems a bit unstructured to me, but which obviously is sufficient for all those Catalyst programmers out there ... so I guess that it's personal taste.

    A comparison between CGI::Application and Catalyst can be found here

[reply]
      The documentation is no more that unstructured since we started the wiki.
      Most entertaining fact about the recent flood of CGI::App plugins is that they all mimic Catalyst features. ;)

      CGI::App has one big advantage over Catalyst, and thats it's minimalism, which makes it perform better on non persistent environments like CGI.
      But we have a new subproject called CGI::Catalyst for this special purpose. ;)
[reply]
Re: Maypole or PageKit?
by fmerges (Chaplain) on Aug 19, 2005 at 23:24 UTC

    Hi,

    You must think about of what you wanna do... you can't say X is better than Y, because that's not true...

    You can't even say that for develope webpages is better one than another, you must do a strict analysis, really!

    If we talk about webpages, a website you must think about the scalability, not only how much traffic, how many request can give solution X or Y, you must think about: what new functionality I must provide tommorow... how many updates will be done to the webpage... who will make they... and a large etc. Because answering this question you can know if what you need is a webpage that gets admin. by admin (content also) or you need a CMS, or need a independent solution (like Bricolage) etc...

    You must be able to distinguish between a web-site and a web-app. If you need a web-app then you can think about what kind of webapp would it be... do it conforms to the MVC model? If yes, then you can think about CGI::Application, Maypole, Catalyst, etc...

    I use some technologies. For website I use often Mason, because I have a lot of code written that I can reuse. I also have some webapp written with Maypole, it's very easy (this remember me that I should update some servers to the latest version of Maypole, which supposed to fix speed issues). I also read the Catalyst documentation, expecting to begin in a few weeks a refactoring of a big webapp.

    Resuming, you should think about what you really want to do, and then choose the easiest solution that also let you scale to the 1 year forward expectations/requirements.

    K.I.S.S.

    Regards,

    |fire| at irc.freenode.net
[reply]
Re: Maypole or PageKit?
by borisz (Canon) on Aug 19, 2005 at 23:52 UTC
[reply]
      Yeap. I checked that before I downloaded the code for the first time. The thing is that I've never used a package with that license before, and I wouldn't know what is the difference with other more well known licenses, unless of course, you work for Ricoh.

      There used to be a chart somewhere where you could easily compare, without being a lawyer, what the difference is between the licences. Personally, I prefer the GPL because I understand that it cannot mutate to proprietary code and you can take legal action with reasonable support if it does.

      The European Union did a report which is published here that does an good analysis on Open Source licenses (the report is called POSS feasability study). The GPL has been tested at least once in court with Progress, and although no real litagation was actually performed it seems to do ok. It also held up to patent problems with RTLinux.
[reply]
        Boris, I forgot to login before replying. I was the one who posted the last license bit.
[reply]
Re: Maypole or PageKit?
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 19, 2005 at 20:49 UTC
    HTML::Mason and AxKit are comparable to PageKit
[reply]

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