Re: Re: Reinventing the spaceship

[perrin]

One effort to deal with this was the P5EE project. Some people wanted to do it by defining a set of APIs that are "P5EE" and then implement those, by writing new modules and retrofitting existing ones. This is sort of how J2EE works, with a central authority defining the APIs.

I prefer an alternative approach, which is to identify a set of high-quality modules which provide a complete toolkit for building most applications. It's very hard to do this in an "official" capacity, because people do have ego tied up in their CPAN modules and choosing one over another can get tricky. It would be easier as a sort of "branded" Perl distribution, although I don't know if P5EE is really the best name for it.

[BrowserUk]

I had never heard of P5EE, but after a quick google I see that it started out with similar ideas and intentions to those that have been building in my mind for a while. I also see from a few of the snippets I read that the original intent of "one really great way" fairly rapidly bacame a "collection of posssibly great ways" with the hope that one would become a clear leader.

I also saw that several groups that had considerable investment in one particular module or set of modules that were invited to participate by bringing their modules in line with the philosophies of P5EE pretty much rejected the notion outright.

Basically, I'd summarise what I have been reading as several groups decided to form teams which diluted the talents and efforts, and others simply didn't want to play, which is a shame. The biggest problem--other than the aweful name:)--would seem to be the blue-sky starting point of the project. A large number of well-thought-through and desirable subprojects and goals, but probably too much and too wide-spread to be successfully tackled as a voluntary, cooperative effort.

I wouldn't mind betting that some considerable efforts have already been done to define and integrate a rationalised subset of the total that is CPAN by various large-scale users of perl already. If only it were possible to obtain the high-level criteria from a few of the more successful of these, it probably wouldn't be too hard to find common threads and strategies within them that could be used as the basis of a rationalised, integrated subset of CPAN that was based upon proven, real requirements, rather than idealised, blue-sky desires.

Thanks for the pointer to P5EE. I will spend a bit more time reading the google-droppings and see if the project is still active and if there is somewhere there I could expend some of my excess time and energies.

It seems fairly clear from the relative dearth of response here that I am barking up the wrong tree (again).

Or maybe I am simply the wrong person to be raising the matter?

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Arthur C. Clarke.

[perrin]

It's just a very difficult thing to do, because you are talking about imposing a lot of structure and some management on people who basically gave us all some free code out of the goodness of their hearts. I remember Michael Schwern made an attempt at this too, with his "Kwalitee" and "CPANTS" ideas. I think he gave up on it, but I don't know the whole story. You might want to ask him.