Game over. We lost. Nothing to see here, move along.

[Aaron Trevena]

On 11/18/05, Ben Evans <ben at bpfh.net> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 11:31:04AM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
> I've been meaning to write up my concerns about this topic for a while
> now, but have been sitting on my hands and waiting for my initial
> irritation to subside.
>
> I've now tried three times to get a Maypole app up and running and have failed
> each time, taking 3-6 days of wasted effort each time.

You never thought to email the list?
Or the maintainers, even after a wasting two evenings?
Or add anything to the wiki about your problems?
Or did you report any bugs to rt.cpan.org?

..checks... nope. zip. nadda.

> The last case was pretty straighforward - a set of SOAP services, backed by a
> database are moving towards release. The DB now needs a set of human
> operator enq / maint screens, which should be web-based.

> If you believe the hype, this should be meat and drink to a web scripting
> framework. If you've believed the hype and bought the T-shirt, you'd hope
> that you'd get basical minimal views over single tables by a clever URL
> scheme, one template and some database introspection.

Yes, trivial. There are examples, there are plenty of perfectly normal
people running production maypole sites that aren't CRUD but rather
dynamic web applications.

> If you've believed the hype, bought the T-shirt and drunk the Kool-Aid then
> you might even think that your junior programmers are going to be productive
> pretty quickly.

Yes. We have a couple of junior programmers who contribute to the
maypole project quite often.

> For five days I struggled to make this thing even show me a view of a single
> table. Five days of buggered call stacks so that I can't even see where
> the error is coming from, no documentation on what gets called when so I can't
> figure out which bit of magic is the cause of it.

Five days, without thinking... maybe I'll pop onto irc, look at a list
archive, ask for help on the wiki? Were you on a desert island or
something dude?

> [ several days of banging head against wall snipped ]

Sorry, but I'm by no means a great hacker, but wtf? I never had these
problems, even when I was stuck on a train with no internet
connection, and no reception on my mobile to phone a friends I managed
better than that.

When was this - which version? 1.x? 2.x? It doesn't sound like
anything I've heard about since well before 2.09 which was nearly a
year ago.

> I went back to using a homegrown MVC codebase I keep kicking about (use the
> Adapter pattern to hide the difference between CGI and Apache::Request inside
> the View object ; make a non-OO dispatch handler inside the Control which
> decides which control method to call based on an incoming form parameter ;
> use DBI rather than CDBI because I no longer trust CDBI to talk to Sybase
> properly ; use simple TT paradigms, because they're easier to teach).
>
> In short - nothing that wasn't already part of the dev experience in 2001-2.
>
> The caveats are pretty obvious: Sybase is nasty, Catalyst is not Maypole, etc.

That's funny because I'm just replacing a bunch of Apache::Request,
TT, CDBI code with maypole, using bog standard maypole 2.10, none of
the new features in SVN for 2.11, no plugins, just the same thing
that's been out for 6 months or so.

> But I'm getting pretty close to just jacking it all in and recommending JSP
> for all future web development. The learning curve will be steeper to begin
> with, but in the end, there are more resources, more support and the key
> risk to projects I'm on will be much less.

Or you could, and obviously you would rather avoid it -- speak to
people about this stuff rather than bottle it up for a year and vent
long after anybody can help, and without any useful details of
specific problems.

Cheers,

A.