The elegant MVC framework

Catalyst will make web development something you had never expected it to be: Fun, rewarding and quick.

The Definitive Guide to Catalyst

This book by Kieren Diment, Matt Trout and others, published by Apress in July 2009 and written for Catalyst 5.8 is now available for purchase from Amazon.com, or get the eBook (PDF) from Apress.

Get it now!

Catalyst 5.8: The Perl MVC Framework

Also Available is the new edition of Catalyst 5.8: The Perl MVC Framework. This revised edition features updated text and a new section detailing the use of Moose with Catalyst.

Development

What makes Catalyst special? It's the way we develop it. Take a look.

We tend to keep things small and simple. This gives us robustness and scalability - your Catalyst-based app also inherits those. No complicated object hierarchies - Keep It Simple, Stupid.

Why reinvent the wheel? When you write your app with Catalyst, you don't have to care much about session handling or authorization. You just use it. CPAN has a vast amount of power, which we bring to you. Don't Repeat Yourself.

If you don't like something in default setup, why not replace it? There Is More Than One Way To Do It. You can choose from a wealth of available models and views, drop in a bunch of plugins and create the setup that fits you best. Data storage? Would you like to use DBIx::Class? Class::DBI::Sweet? Or perhaps you already have a Class::DBI schema? How about presenting the data? Template Toolkit or Mason? HTML::Template, perhaps? And in case you want PNG or PDF output, you'll need just a few lines...

With available plugins, you can extend the functionality of Catalyst. If you want sessions, form validation or authentication, you can have any or all of them.

Catalyst comes with its own lightweight test server for development. It will even restart itself when it detects your sources have changed, so you see results instantly!

Deployment

You can deploy your Catalyst application on FreeBSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris or Windows.

Do you have a favorite web server? Using FastCGI, the same Catalyst application will run under IIS, Zeus, Apache or lighttpd. If you use Apache you can also run your application with any version of mod_perl.

With its wide support of operating systems and application servers, Catalyst allows you to deploy your applications on a system of your choice or adapt existing applications to take advantage of the benefits Catalyst offers. You don't have to adapt to Catalyst because it can adapt to you.

Success

This is by far the most useful and easy to use MVC Framework, I've ever seen... It is View and Model agnostic (to suit your habits), simple, powerful, practical to use AND easy to extend. All I can say is : Just give it a try...
-- Arnaud Assad

Catalyst brings some serious web development mojo to Perl. For a long time I stuck with Perl because of CPAN but thought other languages provided better frameworks and were leaving Perl behind. No more with Catalyst.
-- John Wang

First let me say how cool Catalyst is. I've only just started playing with it, but I like what I see so far! Great job, guys. Big respect to everyone involved.
-- Andy Wardley

Really surprising. I'm used to packages like this (that do lots of things) being tricky to install. Catalyst went right in without a question or a dependency to follow (might be I just happened to have everything underneath; OS X 10.2). Had the skeleton of an app set up and running with the built-in server in 30 seconds. This is similar to things I've been doing on my own--URI dispatching and such--but *so* much better rounded out and easy to extend; reuse. The idea that what I'm writing for a vanilla .cgi is all set to flip over to mod_perl at any time is just flabergasting. With CDBI and TT underneath, web development starts to feel more like recess than work.
-- Ashley Pond V

Catalyst is the most rad framework out there, totaly dope, kthx!

-- Artur Bergman