Re: [Maypole] The Future of Maypole

From: Dave Howorth (dhoworth at mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Thu Nov 04 2004 - 15:50:52 GMT


Sebastian Riedel:
>>Hey, i'm not developing Maypole any further, the rewrite is now a
>>subproject named "Catalyst"...Maypole will stay like it is...(you decide
>>if thats good or bad...)

Simon Flack:
> I think this is a shame. It seems to me that there have been a lot of
> developments and backwardly incompatible changes in the last month or so. And
> so soon after the 2.0 release there's already talk of more widespread changes
> to the framework. How is anyone to take Maypole seriously and invest in time
> learning and developing with it when it's in such flux?
>
> I'd love to see Maypole settle down. Maypole needs to be more defined. What
> are its goals and aims? What is outside the scope of Maypole? I'd like to see
> better documentation and unit tests. I'd like to see growing user confidence
> in Maypole. IMO, it's time to think about whether we need a Maypole 3 and what
> should be in it *only* after all these things are resolved.
>
> Is anyone willing to take over maintainership if Maypole is abandoned? FWIW,
> I'll throw my hat into the ring.

Here's my 2p as a new would-be user of Maypole, FWIW.

I came to Maypole with some experience of TT and CGI, a little of DBI,
absolutely zero of CDBI or mod_perl.

I don't have any problem with the idea of building my own templates,
which Tony suggested might be a difficulty; the current ones seem pretty
simple (I just happen to disagree with Simon C that it's the right
answer to the specific problem I was and am trying to solve).

The learning curves I did have difficulty with were CDBI, including all
the additional packages in its namespace, and the organization of
Maypole's model, request and initialisation.

I'm starting to get a handle on the CDBI family and appreciate it. It's
a large group of packages that has to be learnt, but it's mature,
there's reasonable documentation and a good mailing list.

I was attracted to Maypole by the apparent fit to one part of my design
space (front-ending a database), by the simplicity of the Beer example
and by the supporting docs. But I'm finding I still have trouble
understanding how the central structures fit together - there are
significant holes in the deeper documentation and the mailing list is
patchy. Offsetting this, it's a much newer product and I accept there
will be difficulties because of that, but I still worry about its
readiness for real-life use.

I said in response to Sebastian's first call for future priorities that
I believe documenting and stabilising what's already there has to be top
priority. So I wholeheartedly agree with what Simon F wrote as to the
current state and the future direction. My reaction to the current state
of flux has been to download OpenInteract and see what it can do for me :)

If Sebastian wants to concentrate on developing a new version and was
truly serious that he does not intend developing/maintaining the current
iteration, then I think that responsibility would be better transferred
to Simon F.

Cheers, Dave

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