Re: [Maypole] The Future of Maypole

From: Perrin Harkins (perrin at elem.com)
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 00:06:11 GMT


On Wed, 2004-11-03 at 18:00, Tony Bowden wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 01:27:59PM -0800, Kevin Connor wrote:
> > I checked out Maypole exactly because it used TT and CDBI. I don't want
> > to move away from those technologies or even abstract away from them.
>
> I agree. I'd much rather see Maypole get even more entwined with them.
> When you head in the opposite direction you can no longer play to the
> things that make the various components different - you have to reduce
> everything to lowest common denominator.

I tend to agree that the more your framework does everything, the more
it does nothing. In other words, the advantage that is gained from
using a framework is diminished by making it so general that the path to
setting up a basic app with all the defaults becomes long and the
documentation becomes stretched too thin.

You can try to mitigate this problem by defining careful interfaces for
ambitious people who want to use them to plug in something else, but
only providing examples and code for a specific set of choices. This
seems to be the approach with Maypole so far.

Incidentally, as the youngest kid on the block, it might be a good idea
for Maypole to check out what some of the more mature MVC frameworks for
Perl have done about things like abstraction and declarative
programming. Both OpenInteract (http://http://openinteract.org/) and
Apache::PageKit (http://pagekit.org/) have been around for a while and
significant applications have been built with them. They have both
chosen the tightly coupled route for the most part. Integration with
SPOPS allows OI to do some interesting security things, but is also a
liability for people who are used to Class::DBI. OI 2.0 is
experimenting with the declarative approach. (It uses the ini files
style, which I find much clearer and more trustworthy than YAML, but
that's ultimately beside the point.)

- Perrin

_______________________________________________
maypole mailing list
maypole at lists.netthink.co.uk
http://lists.netthink.co.uk/listinfo/maypole



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Feb 24 2005 - 22:25:57 GMT