[jifty-devel] RE: jifty-devel Digest, Vol 23, Issue 8

[Steve H]

Hi Jifty team,

Firstly, I'd like to say what a great (and promising) tool/framework you have.  Thanks Jesse for having the vision and skill to drive it.
I'd like to use it, and in the process, feed back whatever may help into it's development effort.
I'd started prototyping a new app using Catalyst, and as things progressed, it increasingly seemed that Catalyst was a nuts+bolts framework caught up in low-level Techie stuff with little in the way of design patterns or 'out of the box' stuff... and that many of those with experience in it responded to List questions in a terse, if not condescending manner.  Anyway Jifty, at face value, has nicely packaged an excellent set of building blocks, providing ample impetus to leave catalyst behind.  ...so, I'm working my way through some prototyping now in Jifty.
I encountered various issues at the outset.... which are disconcerting for a new user, not knowing how much of the problem is me versus it.  Things like Jifty gets awfully confused if you attempt to create an application with a name that starts with lower case -- it seems to munge the case (to upper) at different times and then all the dots don't seem to connect.   Then I encountered issues trying to leverage an existing database... initially thinking I could line up Jifty's schema against the existing tables (not seeing anything in the doco to the contrary)... well, after various attempts, I proceeded to build it up via Jifty's schema defs (originally having reasonable column data types, however now living with the generic Text type).  When I first started building it up via Jifty, I was using CAPS in column names -- this seemed to get through Jifty's schema build stuff ok, however, when running the Jifty server, it errored and looped around some apparently missing things when one of those tables was referenced via the Browser admin UI.  Extending the simple tutorial examples helped isolate the issue there.  Further, my original schema included specific names for primary keys, like TAB_PK autoincrement primary etc... which were referenced explicitely in other tables -- it seems that I have to let Jifty auto create the "id" column (at least I couldn't find any doco to the contrary).
...which brings me to the Doco in general.  Much of is is great... other bits are really really er, thin... and there aren't any code snippets to enable context around the various features.  Similarly, with the lack of design patterns, a new user such as myself finds it really difficult to know what/when/where to leverage Jifty's features (along with code snippets for context around the 'how').
I'm not bagging it; just trying to offer some constructive comments from a new Jifty user who is trying to gain some traction using it.

Anyway... is this the correct forum to ask questions regarding using Jifty (after RTFM)?  ...and is there any merit in my commenting on issues I encounter in using it?

regards
Steve



> From: jifty-devel-request at lists.jifty.org
> Subject: jifty-devel Digest, Vol 23, Issue 8
> To: jifty-devel at lists.jifty.org
> Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 12:00:12 -0400
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> 1. Re: [Jifty-commit] r4145 - in Jifty-DBI/trunk: .
> lib/Jifty/DBI (Jesse Vincent)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2007 18:01:07 -0400
> From: Jesse Vincent 
> Subject: [jifty-devel] Re: [Jifty-commit] r4145 - in Jifty-DBI/trunk:
> . lib/Jifty/DBI
> To: jifty-devel at lists.jifty.org
> Message-ID: 
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
>> Date: Mon Sep 24 17:57:41 2007
>> New Revision: 4145
>>
>>
>> Note that if you are accessing the column object's ->{label} directly
>> this will now fail. Use ->label instead.
>
> Would it make sense to stuff a value into {label} to tell users what
> they're doing wrong for a while?
>
> -j
>
> --
>
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> End of jifty-devel Digest, Vol 23, Issue 8
> ******************************************

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