Catalyst is an elegant, open source web application framework, extremely flexible yet very simple. This means that developers can help build applications that run on the web, or that run using protocols used for the web. Catalyst is designed to make it easy to manage the various tasks you need to do to run an application on the web, either by doing them itself, or by letting you “plug in” existing Perl modules that do what you need.
Catalyst is written using Moose, a modern object system for Perl. Its design is heavily inspired by such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Maypole, and Spring.
Catalyst follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern, allowing you to easily separate concerns, like content, presentation, and flow control, into separate modules. This separation allows you to modify code that handles one concern without affecting code that handles the others. Catalyst promotes the re-use of existing Perl modules that already handle common web application concerns well.
Catalyst is based on a “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY) principle, which means that definitions should only have to be made once.
Catalyst is used by a number of different popular sites including BBC iPlayer, Edit Grid, and Manchester Evening News.
Features include:
- Flexible.
- Supports a wide range of models.
- Toolkit-independent (REST & JSON support, specific plugins for Prototype JavaScript Framework, more).
- MVC framework.
- Support for many templating languages such as Template::Toolkit, Mason 2, HTML::Template.
- ORM – DBIx::Class, Rose::DB::Object, more.
- Supports Perl testing standards, Test Anything Protocol (TAP).
- Caching frameworks – Cache, Memcached, shared memory, and more.
- Easy to use dispatching mechanism.
- Integrated development server.
- Supports all major webservers.
- Enables the use of over 12,000 Perl modules available on CPAN for session management, user authentication, caching and more.
- Internationalization support.
Website: metacpan.org/pod/Catalyst
Support: Manual
Developer: Sebastian Riedel
License: PAL and GPL
Catalyst is written in Perl. Learn Perl with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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