We had the distinct pleasure this past Friday at our monthly Perl Mongers meeting of having Jonathan Rockway present an introduction to the Catalyst web application framework. It was great to have one of our neighbors from the windy city make the journey up to Grand Rapids — many thanks, Jonathan.
For those who haven’t heard of Catalyst, I highly recommend taking a look. Just please don’t call it Rails for Perl. That would be selling it far too short.
One of the things that I love about Perl, and I know I’m not alone, is the flexibility of the language and supporting libraries (TIMTOWTDI, see CPAN). That same flexibility is also quite intentionally found in the Catalyst framework. Don’t like Template::Toolkit? No problem! Pick another like, Template::Declare, HTML::Template, Mason, or write your own. Don’t want to use one of the available ORMs? Fine, use Catalyst::Model::DBI and just write your SQL. You don’t even have to use a database if you don’t want to — see Catalyst::Model::SVN, Catalyst::Model::JabberRPC, and Angerwhale for examples. Talk about possibilities!
So take a look, you owe it to yourself. Install it, put it through its paces, and spread the word!