Hi, I'm new to Catalyst so apologies if this is a dumb question. I'm working on a web site using Catalyst and want to use quite a bit of Ajax interactivity to make the site as user friendly and modern as possible. The majority of my knowledge of Catalyst comes from the Jonathon Rockway book, so I have so far been concentrating on using Jemplate for the AJAX, and using a REST interface to handle the data serialization.
This is working very nicely for the retrieve/get part, but I am struggling a bit to figure out the best way of handling forms and the submission & validation of the data. The formbuilder controller makes it incredibly simple to build and validate a form, on both the client and the server, and I want to have similar functionality but AJAX enabled - i.e. I envisage the form submission method being a PUT to a REST controller, and for the submission to cause a div to be updated in place, rather than a load of a new page. In the book the example uses a POST to a pre-existing formbuilder controller as the submission method of the ajax form, which is neat in that it handles the data validation part without writing any code, but not so good in that it is not really ajax-y, as it results in loading a new page. The book also mentions putting data validation into the Model and not in the controller, which I guess would work fine but will require quite a bit more code to be written. I'd rather not have to write the validation myself if there's a good module out there which would do it for me, based on the form definition. So I'm looking for recommendations as to how to handle this - would I be better taking the time to learn one of the javascript libraries (e.g. YUI or Dojo) and moving away from Jemplate, or is there a way to combine formbuilder and Jemplate in a more dynamic ajax-y way? If anyone has any suggestions for other tutorials or example code I could look at to get more ideas of how to do this, I'd be very grateful. regards, Henry ps I have been following the thread on RFC: Catalyst::Controller::REST::DBIC on the list, which seems to be talking about stuff along these lines, but I haven't really gleaned any ideas on how best to tackle this. I also found Jay Shirley's slides on "No REST for the Wicked: Catalyst, REST and YUI" which sounded very relevant, but again I didn't learn enough to really get me coding. pps I found the book incredibly helpful, once I found the errata web site and got past chapter 3. It got me very quickly over the learning curve on Catalyst and writing real code.
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