The first presentation I gave for the Silicon Valley Perl user’s group was on Catalyst; they had just had presentations on Dancer and Mojolicious and I thought it might be nice to show the more complex tool that everyone seemed trepidatious about using. Certainly a focus of the other talks was “See how easy it is! No unneeded stuff!” which was cool. But, at every turn, I kept thinking, “Wait, you had to write that? Catalyst would have done that for me…”
So, I presented these Catalyst Perl Talk Slides had this little demo app: Rechoarder-0.01.tar.gz. Everyone loves code, even when it’s not finished. Everyone caught the two typos in the slides, too, which I can not find now, so they’re still there.
In the talk, I tried to stay very focused on the core things Catalyst does, and only mention all the other stuff that can be included. I focused on MVC and how actions are called, as that’s really what Catalyst does. All the other cool stuff with templates and databases and cookies and authentication are actually other systems. Catalyst ties them together and lets you map URLs into Perl function calls, doing much of the repetitive work for you as possible.
I hope I got across that Catalyst isn’t DBIC or TT, and that those things are often used with Catalyst, but not needed to understand what the framework itself does.
It’s six months late, but I had someone at last month’s SVPerl ask for the code, so here’s a post with the code and the slides.
On slide 18 the example says “:Local” where it should say “:Global”.
Slide 20 has “:path” in the second example, rather than “:Path”.
Maybe those were the typos? :-)