Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianhoward | Hacker News Reader

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Catalyst == larger community + more documentation + lots of useful modules out there. The downside is that it takes a heck of a lot of effort to get up to speed and I personally find that it can get in the way a little for smaller projects.

Frameworks like Mojolicious, Jifty (http://jifty.org/) and Dancer (http://perldancer.org) are much quicker to get up to speed on, but suffer slightly from having a smaller community of users and developers.

I've been playing with non-Catalyst frameworks a bit recently as I've been pondering a little bit of product development on an in-house project.

Of the non-Catalyst Perl web frameworks Dancer is my favourite http://perldancer.org/. For my money it's a neater package than Mojolicious, which takes the no-dependency thing a little bit too far for me. Dancer's non-OO DSL declarative style seems to work quite well (it's very heavily inspired by Ruby's Sinatra).

I'm going to give Dancer / Plack a whirl as the basis for a non-trivial app soon. I think it'll work quite well from my experiences so far.

(BTW - if you've not started playing with Plack in Perl - do so. Veeeeery nice.)

As to what you should learn - who knows :-) If it were me I'd spend at least a few hours playing with Dancer/Mojolicious/Jifty first - since any of them will have you up and running with a demo in a few minutes. Catalyst will take more work.

Another vote for Dancer from me. You can start with a tiny one-file script and then slowly use sessions, templates, Plack middleware etc. as you need it. It's very elegant.

There is nothing Dancer does that Mojolicious can't do better, and then some.

TIMTOWTDI (for the non perl guys, there is more than one way to do it - the motto of Perl)

Mojolicious is very cool, has strong leadership, direction, and is very opinionated.

I prefer Dancer, and believe it fills a slightly different niche - but the competition between both can only be a good thing.

I didn't mean to attack Mojolicious at all. I've never played with it, but it seems very cool. I have used Dancer, and liked it very much, that's all I wanted to say.

It's great that you promote your framework, but it doesn't mean that similar frameworks can't be good.

They are not even playing in the same league.

You keep hinting at Dancer's inferiority without giving any examples.

When I said Dancer is "similar" I was only thinking of Mojolicious::Lite. Feature-wise Dancer and Mojolicious are obviously not in the same league, and are not meant to be. People who just needed a small and easy solution were happy enough with Dancer.

Maybe nowadays Mojolicious::Lite should be their go-to solution - but you're not gonna convince anyone that way.

Also, completely replacing your comment without indicating it with an [edit] or similar isn't very nice.

I admire your work in the Perl web space, and have been following it via Planet Perl. There's no need to defend it with snarky one-liners.

I've given very specific examples before, the result was a flame war, i have no interest in that.

Now i would rather stay on topic and talk about more exciting things like Mojolicious.

May I underline that the flamewar you're referring to was totally intended by yourself? Your (public) IRC logs prove it by themselves (you even called that a "marketing" campaign). So it's a bit funny when you say afterwards "i have no interest in that".

For the "design issues" in Dancer, you may not know, but the code base has hugely been rewritten since your last epic marketing actions. So what you're saying here might be very well obsolete, just for the record.

Oh and one last word, as I said before, I don't understand why you put so much hate and energy when Dancer is mentioned. What's the problem? Do you want to rule the world or what?

If Mojolicious is so good, why do you need to make so much noise?

And yet, the second i state that i have no interest in a flame war you suddenly pop up to start one, bravo.

P.S.: Every single design issue i pointed out is still present.

you're funny :) really.

What about documentation? A few months ago, I was interested in Mojolicious, but it seemed to me, that the docs were hidden and incomplete, I completely lost my interest for that reason alone.

They have improved significantly and are still improving, just take a look at the included Mojolicious::Lite tutorial and the Mojolicious::Guides.

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