News by CGIDir

Perl Web Application Framework Catalyst Upgraded

CGIDir
Wednesday, July 12, 2006; 03:28 AM

The Catalyst Core Team announced the next major release of the Catalyst framework, version 5.7000. The new release is the result of contributions from large number of developers, in the form of the documentation as well as people submitting patches and ideas.

Catalyst is an open source web application development framework written in Perl, that closely follows the Model-view-controller (MVC) architecture. It is inspired by such frameworks as Ruby On Rails, Maypole, and Spring.

One major focus in the new release is the improvement of the Tutorial and Introduction parts of the Catalyst manual, as well as a complete review of the reference API documentation and the Cookbook. While the Core Team acknowledged that there is still much to be done, they expressed hope that the new release will make it easier for new users to learn and enjoy Catalyst.

Another major feature in this release is the new ActionClass templates, which allows developers to make pre-made actions that can be extended and customized through a simple API. Catalyst::Action::RenderView is the first of these ActionClasses; more are expected to follow on Perl repository CPAN. RenderView is a reimplementation of the DefaultEnd plugin, and is now used by default in applications generated by catalyst.pl.

A review was done on the rest of the code catalyst.pl creates, and the updated version will allow the building of your new applications even quicker. Log output was changed to be more concise and readable. The debug screen has also had a makeover. A new color scheme and Data::Dump generated debug output is intende to make it more readable and useful.

Another major change is related to distribution. The Catalyst distribution was split into a Runtime and Devel part. This is described as a "cleaner design overall", and means an application only needs to install what it needs to run on the servers. Catalyst is still a part of the Catalyst-Runtime distribution, so it can still be install it with perl -MCPAN -e'install Catalyst'. Module authors are encouraged to depend on Catalyst::Runtime rather than the Catalyst module from now on, but both will work.

The Devel and Runtime distributions can be downloaded on a CPAN mirror or by visiting either of the following URLs:

http://dev.thefeed.no/stuff/Catalyst-Devel-1.00.tar.gz
http://dev.thefeed.no/stuff/Catalyst-Runtime-5.7000.tar.gz

http://www.catalystframework.org/