[Catalyst] Need To Ramp Up On Recent Catalyst Updates, Return To Application Coding

[Robert L Cochran]

I'm "coming back" to using Catalyst to build an application, but have not actually used Catalyst for the entire summer and fall of 2008. I am just now starting to return to it. Let's say I had a midlife crisis (smile). 

I'm now faced with some coding issues. Namely, I have forgotten a lot of the Catalyst I have learned as of the late Spring 2008. I also forgot a lot of my Perl, too.

I'm doing all my development work on a VMWare virtual machine running CentOS 5.2 updated to current patch levels. CentOS is the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2. This means I'm still using Perl 5.8.8.

I know from very quick glances at the mailing list headers that Catalyst had, or perhaps will have, a major update. I think my Catalyst implementation is still at 5.7014.

How do I update it, using CPAN? I forgot. Even worse, I forgot whether I installed Perl modules related to Catalyst 5.7014 or how to get a list of these modules so I can check for updates to them. 

And finally, what should I be reading in order to re-learn the current version of Catalyst?

I noticed some posts from Dr. Jennifer Nussbaum who seems to be doing something similar to what I need to do: store stuff in tables and allow users to download those tables as comma separated values text from anywhere. I think she was focused on image data and I expect I'll need to work with that, too, but the big goal for now is to allow csv-based downloads, only the delimiter used won't be commas.

Thanks for any and all suggestions!

Bob Cochran
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA