A Quick Update On The Catalyst Poll

So we launched last week  a poll aimed generally at people using Catalyst in an attempt to start a dialog about where the Catalyst webframework is going to head over the next few years.  So far over two hundred of you stepped up to fill out the poll, which is great to see!  A few interesting details so far:

Most of those who filled out the poll identify themselves as web developers who are rather familiar with Catalyst, who use mostly newer versions of the web framework on recent versions of Perl.  You are in general happy with Catalyst, but would love to see more blogging about how to use the framework, and you'd like to see a balance between documentation and new code.  You are excited about new features, but have no understanding of the logn term project goals and feel confused about how to help achieve them.  Additionally you'd prefer a moderate time between releases (perhaps based around quarterly, not weekly goals, might be one interpretation).

This is all great information for us to have, and its awesome we are getting this conversation going.  However I am a bit worried that so far we are a pretty self selecting group.  I know there are a lot of people dealing with legacy Perl and Catalyst, and there are people who consider themselves new to the framework and would like to find a way to help.  So I'm going to hold the poll open for a while longer and reach out especially to people who are not already very familiar with Catalyst to please come and help us help you better.  I need the thoughts of people outside of development, such as admins / webops as well, and in particular I want to hear from people that have older version of Catalyst installed and who are just maintaining stuff.

And if you don't particularly love Catalyst, I want to hear from you as well.  Just because you are doing all your new development in other frameworks or (gasp) other languages, knowing what you think would help us understand better the problems that caused you to decide Catalyst is no longer working for you.  You never know when your job situation might change, and you end up maintaining some Catalyst application, and in that case I want to see if we can better understand your issues so that experience is better.

So in general I want to get more diversity rolling here! 

Thanks!

Comments

[Norbert Buchmuller]

I think the poll was a good idea. Regarding how to reach more people (and a more representative sample) - have the idea already come up that we could put a link to the poll in the Catalyst documentation and on the Catalyst website? (And keeping the poll open for even longer, of course.)

[SAtish]

It is harder,time consuming to implement and complex, time consuming to understand.

[Online Poll]

Wow! Thanks! I've already bookmarked the site & saved a couple reports!