By Kieren Diment

Over the past couple of months, Matt Trout and I have been putting together a book proposal for the Catalyst web framework. We did this because a. we want to publish a book about Catalyst, and b. because a publisher approached us. Now that the proposal is in, the editorial board are concerned that there is insufficient market.

I've looked at a bunch of statistics (mailing list size, Google hits, IRC channel size, Amazon sales rankings and more) to compare the size of Catalyst to a group of other web frameworks. Catalyst comes out at the bottom of the top of this list, in that it's the least popular of the "big" frameworks - Ruby on Rails, Django and so on. On the other hand, it's clearly an order of magnitude more popular than the small frameworks (Pylons, Turbogears and the like). We also know that Catalyst runs some pretty big streaming media websites, including some that we're a bit embarrassed (NSFW) to talk about. Catalyst is also rumoured to be running the BBC iPlayer.

Our publisher now has cold feet, and wants to collect more data on the size of the market before they give us the go-ahead, so if you use Catalyst, please answer a short survey for us . My aim is 100 responses (10% of mailing list subscribers).

The questions are as follows:

  • What country are you in?
  • How many people are on your team?
  • How many of those people are writing code with Catalyst? If there are non Catalyst coders on your team, how many of the whole team would you like to be writing Catalyst code?
  • How many people using Catalyst on your team are subscribers to the Catalyst mailing list?
  • How many people writing Catalyst code on your team use the #catalyst IRC channel on irc.perl.org?
  • What do you see as potential for growth of Catalyst in your organisation? How many people do you think will be using Catalyst in your organisation in 12 months? In 2 years?

Please email your answers to kdiment@uow.edu.au.

Kieren Diment is a Researcher at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He uses Perl and Catalyst for the social science research that he does.