[Catalyst] Catalyst Documentation

Kieren Diment diment at gmail.com
Thu Jun 1 00:07:53 CEST 2006


Apologies for the arrogance :)

I think that the point I was making was that Mason seems to require custom
systems in place, and iirc from when I looked into mason, a long time ago,
also requires mod_perl, a problem in a shared hosting environment.  Perin
expressed this much more clearly than me, clearly because he has significant
experience with Mason, which I do not.

Technology goes through iterations - as in the progression from mechanical
pianos, to wax cylinders to discs and so on.  Mason is an excellent example
of high quality stuff from the previous iteration of web development
methodology.  Because of my circumstances I wouldn't be able to be involved
in serious web development without something like catalyst to take out the
repetetive strain.

As mentioned previously, the catalyst documentaton:

svn co http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/Catalyst/branches/Catalyst-docs
currently in the docs branch of the svn repos is essential reading.

svn co http://dev.catalyst.perl.org/repos/Catalyst/branches/Catalyst-docs

On 01/06/06, Paul Wallingford <paul at cybergestalt.net> wrote:
>
> Perrin Harkins wrote:
> > On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 07:47 +1000, Kieren Diment wrote:
> >
> >> Mason is a templating system with a few application-development type
> >> features included. Catalyst is a full blown application development
> >> environment.  Mason makes a serviceable Catalyst View, although I
> >> perfer Template Toolkit for a couple of reasons.
> >
> > I think you're exaggerating the differences here.  Although they go
> > about it in totally different ways, Mason and Catalyst offer very
> > similar functionality.  For example:
> >
> > - Flexible ways to map URIs to code.
> > - Uniform API for access to request data and passing parameters.
> > - Abstraction of runtime environment so that mod_perl, CGI, and FastCGI
> > all work the same.
> > - Error handling with helpful debug screens.
> > - Plugins for sessions and other extras.
> >
> > You could say that Mason has MORE ground to cover in the docs, since it
> > actually includes a templating system and a cache, while Catalyst just
> > provides glue code.  (The cache is provided by Cache::Cache, but is
> > covered nicely in the Mason docs.)
> >
> > My point is not to belittle Catalyst, but rather to say that Mason is a
> > good example of a complex Perl project with very readable docs, and it's
> > worth looking at.  The quality of documentation was one of the things
> > that set Mason apart from the very beginning, and I think it was a key
> > reason for Mason's success.  It came with guides for developers and
> > administrators and had a more professional feel to it than most of the
> > other tools at that time.
>
> Thanks for the reply Perrin.  I am very familiar with Mason and have
> built a lot of stuff that does what Catalyst does.  However, I am
> looking for something to speed development - and a framework like
> Catalyst just might do the trick.  Building custom systems each time
> takes too long and I don't have time to build my own framework.
> Catalyst *seems* to fit the bill and I want to evaluate it, but the
> documentation seems lacking.  Maybe I am just spoiled with Mason.
>
> That said, obviously I feel that Catalyst has a lot to offer, otherwise
> I would not even consider wasting valuable time evaluating it (and there
> are a lot of other frameworks that I have discounted right off the bat).
>   This says a lot about my opinion of Catalyst.  Plus a lot of people
> use Catalyst and Mason together, which is encouraging.
>
> I was a bit turned off by the arrogant reply by Kieren, however.  I just
> wanted a little guidance, not some overblown sales pitch.
>
> Thanks again.
>
> Paul Wallingford
>
>
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