Re: Barracuda: Barracuda Evaluation

Very informative, thank you!

Other opinions? Please chime in....

On Tue, 14 Jan 2003 22:27:35 +0100, Diez B. Roggisch <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
>
>> I'm evaluating Barracuda framework and comparing it against other open-
>> source frameworks of the type.
>>
>> I was curious to find out from people who have actually used Barracuda 
>> on
>> large-or medium-sized projects:
>> 1. How has your overall experience with Barracuda been? Positive, 
>> negative,
>> mixed?
>
> The learnig-curve is quite steep. And you should have one or even a few 
> developers who produce mockups/example code (or actually used code, but 
> which is clear and documented), and make the less expierienced ones look 
> at this. Soon some sort of best-practices should emerge.
>
> Once after that stage has been achieved, its really wonderful to work 
> with barracuda. I personally haven't seen anything better (at least in 
> the java-world, ZPT (Zope page templates) have a very similar approach.) 
> And I just recently had to work with JSPs and have to say that I prefer 
> even PHP over them. Barracudas clean code/layout separation is definitely 
> the way to go.
>
> The event and form mapping are outstanding. The latter one is used by us 
> in nearly every app that has to deal with HTTP, even if we aren't 
> responsible for the actual front-end.
>
>> 2. What problems have you encountered in design/development stages of 
>> your
>> project that are related to this framework?
>
> For us, the biggest problem was that HTML-rendering is something nearly 
> every developer believes he/she knows how to do. So you'll end up with 
> code putting together html tags as Strings, and returning these as 
> BTexts.
>
> In comparision, nobody would abandon an CMP Entity beans for a BMP just 
> because one has done SQL-queries before.
>
> This is a major problem. You have to somewhat force them to actually 
> _use_ the component model. For us, that resulted in a great deal of 
> reusable code - e.g. baseclasses for rendering content items, which were 
> subclassed to perform item-type-specific code. Or general purpose 
> classes, lets say for paging result lists or shared parts of the page 
> like the navigation and personalization stuff. We didn't encounter 
> anything that wasn't doable in barracuda in a clean, nice way. But you 
> have to think the barracuda way ;)
>
> And thus, it somewhat separates actual developers from "webmonkeys". 
> While this might sound harsh, its a fact (and I think a desirable one) 
> that you don't have to put a weak developer resource onto a simple task 
> like changing the table-layout of your page, because the designers lack 
> the capability of messing with the code/layout mix of JSP/PHP/ASP. Thats 
> purely done in the HTML, by the designers.
>
>
>> 3. What, in your opinion, is missing in this framework
>
> I once started writing a filter-framework, that could be applied to data 
> (lets say dates or other complex types) hold in the application objects. 
> That allowed for controlling the layout of these using an xml-descriptor 
> easily to be manipulated by designers, not the developers. Think of a 
> date: When first designing a screen, it might have been appropriate to 
> represent a date and time like this:
>
> 3/8/2003, 12:00
>
> So its sufficient to store that as a single value in a model (think of a 
> model as a hashmap).
>
> But then the screen designers decided to split the thing in two halfs, 
> making it necessary to actually have two keys in the respective model. 
> The filterframework allowed to make a copy of a value, and then apply 
> different formats/filters to them. That would result in one date and one 
> time that could be used independendly. Currently, you have to alter your 
> code for that, or think of it beforhand.
>
> It is in my contrib package, but lacks docs and to be honest, I would 
> like to write it from scratch. I would like to add dynamic CSS classes 
> and some other stuff. But this is not a lacking feature which tackles the 
> actual usability of barracuda. It would just make things nicer and keep 
> me even further away from messing with HTML :)
>
> HTH,
>
> Diez
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>



-- 
Leon Parnas
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