gwhite has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
I have a twelve year old cross platform CGI application that I produce for 20-30 new clients every year. It uses a good amount of CPAN from a big rewrite in 2002-2003, DBI, CGI, Text::Template, etc. and a bunch of my code that does what it does. My parts of it are around 7,000 lines of code. In the next few months, I am going to internationalize the application and do my standard round of improvements and tweaks that I do every year.
That being said, is it time to look at moving to a standard framework, such as CGI::Application, Catalyst or one of the other pieces of work? If I were starting from scratch, I would certainly be looking at one of these, but I'm not starting from scratch. None of the frameworks seem to support Text::Template and I have about 300 templates done in a Text::Template format. Would adding a plugin/hook to this be terribly complicated or defeating the whole purpose of a standardized framework? I am trying to decide if the reason to move is just being a cool kid that uses a spiffy framework, or could this actually make my life easier if I continue to produce this app for another 12 years.
I still write about 30-40% of the code, but use contractors to do the rest and they have to "learn" how the whole thing goes together each time I bring a new one into the loop. Even with moving to a framework I am not sure that this won't still be the case.
Can anyone tell me about their experience porting a big CGI app to a framework? was it worth it? is there anything in this ramble that makes it obvious I should go one way or the other?