On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, Raymond Wan wrote: > Just looking at the link that Dave sent, I'm skimming over the MVC part and > as my system doesn't use an SQL database, I'm wondering if Catalyst is > overkill?? Anyway, I'll look at the on-line documentation some more and if > thinks look better, maybe I can then look into the upcoming Catalyst book.
This is a serious failing of the Catalyst documentation, in that it makes you think it has something to do with a model, when it really doesn't. Maybe some day I'll take a crack at the docs and try to rectify this, but for now, here's me executive summary. All Catalyst is, at its core, is a tool to help you map URIs to some bit of code to execute. This is the Controller part of MVC. Catalyst also does a number of other things for you which are very helpful when developing web apps. * Provides a unified Request/Response API which works identically in any web environment, including vanilla CGI, FastCGI, SpeedyCGI, mod_perl, and several standalone Perl-based web servers. * Provides a great development environment that allows you to start a single-process/thread dev server by running ./script/myapp_server.pl. This server is also capable of restarting itself any time relevant files in your app are changed (like Apache(2)::Reload). * Has a whole bunch of plugins for simplifying common webapp tasks such as ... ** sessions ** an authorization/authentication API usable in any controller method ** RESTful URIs ** redirects ** debugging & tracing ** logging ** much more It also has some hooks to make working with Model classes potentially easier, but it's important to realize that you can ignore this part of Catalyst entirely (I do), and still get a lot of use out it. Similarly, while the Catalyst docs are show TT examples, the choice of templating view (or even a view that _isn't_ template-based) is entirely up to you, and using Mason with Catalyst is trivially easy. -dave /*============================================================ http://VegGuide.org http://blog.urth.org Your guide to all that's veg House Absolute(ly Pointless) ============================================================*/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mason-users mailing list Mason-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mason-users
