On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:32 AM, Jay Kuri <j...@ion0.com> wrote: > > My working list is as follows (in no particular order.) > > 1) 'Getting' DBIx::Class (starting from a straight SQL-users point of > view)
I'm new to Catalyst, having started to look into it a few months back (and now developing several apps in it). The auto-schema stuff on DBIx::Class was great. All the has_many & many_to_many it took a while to wrap my brain around, and I'm still a bit fuzzy on some of it, but referring back to the docs, I can figure it out. Trying to do a moderately complex SQL query in DBIx::Class is a nightmare! Sometimes I wish I could just write out the SQL myself - even if it's chunked up into fields, condition, join, etc... > 3) Walkthrough of creation of a simple app end to end. I found the Tutorial walkthrough (http://search.cpan.org/~hkclark/Catalyst-Manual-5.7016/lib/Catalyst/Manual/Tutorial.pod) to be great as a kick-start. I just wish the Advanced CRUD was a bit more fleshed out (or that FormFu was easily apt-gettable). Having a branching tutorial with some alternatives (such as something other than TT, for example) would be good. I think what I miss most is: *A quick reference "howto" guide for common (and advanced) stuff. How do I get a HTTP header? How do I set a response status? How do I have a wrapper template, yet also support other forms of output like AJAX/JSON/XML? What does this method or that method do and where should they be used? How can I use two separate Authentication systems for different parts of the app? Just brief FAQ-style code snippets with good explanations... (Maybe someone could whip up a Catalyst FAQ app to handle question submissions, community answers, categorisation, searching, etc... Would be better IMHO than a single Wiki page... ^_^) *Clarification on the Path and Args (and others?) sub parameters, with examples on advanced usage. *Best Practices - I guess this comes in to the earlier points as well. Rather than munge something together that works, if I can easily find a code snippet that does a similar thing, then I'll use that snippet. For example; How do I provide a controller which handles both a HTML and an AJAX response? How do I specify the AJAX qualifier in the query string? Do I use a query parameter? Or append something like ":ajax" to the URI? Or go to a completely separate URI? How do I set out my Controller methods to most efficiently handle both situations without code duplication? *Interactive Demo/Tuts would be really good. If there's so many CRUD systems to choose from, then having a live demo of each next to the relevant code snippet would really help quickly highlight the pros & cons of each. *Better linking/cataloguing to documentation. For example, the Wiki seems to have a Cookbook, with a handful of articles. There's also, it seems, a quite extensive Cookbook in the CPAN documentation - yet the Wiki doesn't link to it or mention it? As I said, I found the Tutorial to be really good, but I find I'm using the Tutorial as my documentation for my own app, rather than looking straight in the manual, or in the wiki resources... The Manual Cookbook seems good - I should use it more often. I'm pretty new to the Catalyst community, and still very much a Catalyst newbie. I don't know how open this list is to having the same n00b questions asked over & over again. I'd be happy to write up a few "howto's" myself, as I discover stuff, but I'm not confident I'm doing things the "right" way anyway, or if people would care about the same topics I struggle with, or where the best place to document this sort of Cookbook/FAQ stuff is... -- Trevor Phillips - http://dortamur.livejournal.com/ "On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. And good deeds, of course. But mostly evil, on the whole." -- (Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters) _______________________________________________ List: Catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk Listinfo: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst Searchable archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/catalyst@lists.scsys.co.uk/ Dev site: http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/
