I've been toying with the fantastic idea of a "Catalyst Studio" type of application. Not saying I would or could write such a thing -- I likely could, it's merely a matter of a "serious lack of time".
A quick and dirty back story: I've been finishing off the newest revision of whatthefuck.com in Catalyst 5.7 on Perl. It's really quite a neat tool, really designed for large scale web applications that require the ability to scale, and will likely have many hands on it. It lacks the (relative) simplicity of your average PHP script, as well as the elegance and niceties that go with other object oriented web application servers such as WebObjects.
WebObjects, for those who don't know, is one of the modern founding fathers of MVC web application development. Large companies used WebObjects to create high availability, large scale applications and paid anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 for the privilege to do so. WO was originally developed by NeXT Software, was written using Objective-C, and ran on NeXT Server software. As time went on, it ran on Solaris and Windows, and converted completely to Java between version 4 and 5. After Apple bought NeXT, WebObjects became a part of Apple Enterprise. Now, you can't write a WO app in Objective-C, and development is free with any copy of Mac OS X 10.4, and deployment is free with any copy of Mac OS X Server 10.4. Unfortunately, you can't even pay them money to deploy or develop on any other platform. It's simply end of life.
History lesson being complete, I can finally rejoin my train of thought, 200 miles down the track. WebObjects was really cool in that you never had to touch a database, and sometimes, never had to touch code. You would use an application called EOModeler to design a database schema, creating the data sets you need, designing relationships to other tables, and creating a data map. This is a lot easier than it sounds -- if you've ever organized a database, even an Excel spreadsheet, you can use EOModeler. Now here's the cool part. EOModeler will then create the tables in any of its supported JDBC databases, and generate Java classes for you to add, remove, modify, or delete data, so you never really have to write any SQL unless you absolutely have to.
The ORM features in Catalyst allow the same type of system to happen. You can tell Catalyst to generate some classes based on your existing MySQL, or Postgres, or whatever database, and you can use those classes to do the same add/remove/modify/delete as above. Except for the fact that you have to manually declare relationships within each class. The references to them are kinda odd as well, but I can go into that later.
The other issue with Catalyst is the fact that it's written in Perl, so there are twelve different ways to do the same thing. Catalyst is the perfect microcosm of perl culture. When I first looked at Catalyst, early in 2005, there was a certain recommended way of creating your application, and a certain database model (Class::DBI or Class::DBI::Sweet if you were on the edge), and most tutorials had you manually creating classes anyhow. Now, it's all DBIx::Class::Schema and RenderView, and this will probably all be replaced in 5.8. On top of that, many of the handy perl IDEs won't help you much with your Catalyst object ($c), or render the standard Catalyst tree very well. Java users have all sorts of fun tools, and WebObjects users have a whole IDE that work very well. Sure, we have TextMate or Komodo, but they aren't the whole shebang, and I want the whole shebang.
Maybe I will take on a project that works like EOModeler, but works with DBIx::Class::Schema and Catalyst. Maybe we can go from there.
Technorati Tags: catalyst, catalyst studio, webobjects, whatthefuck.com
