MighTyV's source code was released today. For those who don't know, MighTyV is a Catalyst application, and the winner of the BBC Backstage competition.
This led me to find a very nice talk about it too.
I think the message I most clearly got from the talk is that Catalyst and Perl are a wonderful platform to work on. The reasons for this are:
- The slides contained no complaints about dealing with Catalyst issues - I'm assuming that if there were problems they were trivial*. I often hear about Ruby on Rails and Maypole that along with their automagical ease of use they also tend to force you into a "one true way" of doing things, and that if you need to stray from that path you're probably out of luck. I felt this with Maypole about a year and a half ago, but it has never happened to me with Catalyst.
- Just look at the number of CPAN modules mentioned (HTML::TagCloud, Text::Tags::Parser, Search::ContextGraph, Image::Imlib2, DateTime, JSON, Data::ICal::DateTime and a huge list of Catalyst plugins). The Ruby on Rails video has the phrase "Look at everything I'm not doing" repeated over and over again, with respect to actions automatically mapping to templates, and stuff like that. In my opinion this is the real stuff you should not be doing - you should be writing as little code as possible, and the CPAN helps you achieve this goal.
These two points make me feel very confident that Catalyst is by far the most attractive platform to be working on right now, even if perl doesn't have the nicest syntax, or requires more discipline from the programmer.
* note that one of MighTyV's authors,
Leon Brocard also wrote
Devel::ebug::HTTP, which is possibly an even more convincing example of Catalyst's flexibility
