k wrote:
Comparison of dynamic web frameworks to J2EE/JSPs.

[ Very interesting and informative. One of the guys in my team at work has been struggling, for months now, with a totally convoluted J2EE/JSP/Beans application (with a SAS backend, the part he's expert at). I've had to step in and help a bit just because I have a greater understanding of java and some of the XML garbage, but it sucks. We also don't have the source, so that's even more fun.

Meantime, i'm developing a personal project in Rails and found it pretty nice. I didn't go through a long exploration process, but it sounded good so I figured I'd give it a shot. So far, so good.

I will note that this vid must've been produced before Rails added support for what they call Migrations, which is a Ruby-based data modelling mechanism. You still have to run one SQL command at the beginning of your project, but from that point on, you just specify the data model in a simple ruby way and run the migration. It versions your migrations too, so if you create a table, or add some fields, that you don't actually want, you can roll it back to a previous version. Anyway, that feature brings rails a bit closer to the others, i guess. -k]

I built our prototype using Perl/CGI and JS, without any decent toolset. It was terrible.

Then I found Catalyst, DBIx::Class and Firebug. Catalyst is not unlike Rails. Catalyst is wonderful: I get an MVC framework, and the CPAN. I don't have to worry about authenticaiton, sessions, etc and I can still pluging any one of a million perl packages. This allows me to focus on what is novel about our application. DBIx::Class writes my joins for me, although we do enough complicated SQL I end up sending alot of raw SQL through it. And Firebug lets me look at XMLHttpRequests and helps me debug JS.

Jello wrote:
I built our prototype using Perl/CGI and JS, without any decent toolset. It was terrible.

Sweet jebus, i can imagine it was.

Then I found Catalyst, DBIx::Class and Firebug. Catalyst is not unlike Rails. Catalyst is wonderful: I get an MVC framework, and the CPAN. I don't have to worry about authenticaiton, sessions, etc and I can still pluging any one of a million perl packages. This allows me to focus on what is novel about our application. DBIx::Class writes my joins for me, although we do enough complicated SQL I end up sending alot of raw SQL through it. And Firebug lets me look at XMLHttpRequests and helps me debug JS.

I haven't any experience with Catalyst, but it sounds nice, particularly if you're already a Perl ninja. FireBug, OTOH, i love and use frequently, even with the C#/.NET backed app I'm partially responsible for at work.