Marcus Ramberg responded to my post on How I Use Catalyst, and I’d like to respond to a few points he made.
Marcus wrote:
I disagree that $schema->resultset(‘Person’) is a significant improvement on $c->model(‘DBIC::Person’).
Me too! I don’t think the former is a significant improvement over the latter. They are, after
all, more or less the same. The one big problem is that the latter version uses a nonexisting
DBIC::Person namespace. There are no DBIC classes anywhere in the app. I think the model version
would be much better if it was just written as $c->model('Person').
Marcus also points out that the model layer lets you configure multiple models and access them in a unified way. That is indeed nice. Unfortunately, that has the problem of tying yourself to Catalyst’s config, which is problematic for reasons I already described. Similarly, the unified layer only exists inside Catalyst, which is really only accessible during a web request. So now we’re stuck with recreating all of this if we need to access our models outside of a web request.
The long-term Catalyst roadmap includes the much-talked-about application/context split. Once this is done, presumably you will be able to access the application, which I take to mean config and models, outside of the context (of a web request). Once that is in place, I think many of my objections will go away. Unfortunately, for now I have to write my own application/context splitting code.