[Catalyst] Partial page cache plugin

[Octavian Râsnita]

From: "Julien Sobrier" <julien at sobrier.net>
> Hello,
> there is a plugin for caching an entire page.  I am looking for the same
> type of plugin to cache part of the page, but did not find one. Waht is 
> the
> best way to achieve this in Catalyst?

You can use Catalyst::Plugin::Cache. You can do:

use Digest::SHA1 'sha1_hex';
use base 'Catalyst::Controller';

sub foo : Local {
  my ($self, $c) = @_;

my $name = $c->req->params->{name};
my $age = $c->req->params->{age};
my $page = $c->req->params->{page};

  my $hash = sha1_hex('foo', $name, $age, $page);
  my $cache = $c->cache;
  my $page_part = $cache->get($hash);

unless ($page_part) {
#Here make the selection from the database, get the data from somewhere 
else...
my $object = $c->model("DB::Table")->search({
name => {-like => "%$name%"},
age => $age,
},{
order_by => 'name',
rows => 20,
page => $page,
});

$c->stash(obj => $obj);
$page_part = $c->view('TT')->render($c, 
'template/for/that/part/of/the/page.tt');

$cache->set($hash, $page_part, 600);
}

$c->stash(page_part => $page_part);
}

This way it works fine, although if someone has an easier and/or nicer 
solution, please tell us.

PageCache has some conflicts with another plugin, if I remember well is 
Catalyst::Plugin::Unicode.

Template::Plugin::Cache that can be used for page parts caching very easy 
doesn't work well with templates that contain special UTF-8 chars (I was 
informed that this is because the FileCache module and I heard that it could 
work with a CHI object).

Anyway, if somebody has some recommendations for speed improvements with 
Catalyst, please tell us if there are (I have checked a PHP page with many 
dynamic types of data that have a 44 requests/second, but I wasn't able to 
create a much simpler page with Catalyst that displays so fast).
Yes, I know, the PHP page is low level, harder to create and to maintain, 
gives bad errors, but I can't convince that Catalyst is good if it is not 
fast enough, so any tips for using caches or other ways of improving the 
speed are welcome.

Thank you.

Octavian