Many web applications are implemented in a way that makes developing them difficult and repetitive. Catalyst is an open source Perl-based Model-View-Controller framework that aims to solve this problem by reorganizing your web application to design and implement it in a natural, maintainable, and testable manner, making web development fun, fast, and rewarding.

This book teaches you how to use Catalyst to weave the various components involved in a web application, using methods and tools you personally prefer along with recommendations and details on the most popularly used objects like the DBIX ORM, TT2 Template, and Moose.

This book will take you from how the MVC pattern simplifies creating quality applications to how Catalyst allows you to tap this power instantly. It explains advanced design patterns and concludes with the improvements that Moose brings to all this. It also incorporates valuable suggestions and feedback received from the community members and our customers. By the end of the book, you will be able to build clean, scalable, and extendable web applications. This book embodies Catalyst's philosophies of Do It Yourself and Don't Repeat Yourself.

Design, develop, test, and deploy applications rapidly with the open source MVC Catalyst frameworkWhat you will learn from this book

• Use the Template toolkit to generate HTML output
• Design a database schema and access a SQLite database
• Create a CRUD interface to a database
• Use FormBuilder to define auto-generating and self-validating forms
• Create easy-to-maintain configuration files
• Import CSV files into a database
• Paginate search results
• Use the session plugin to add sessions to an application
• Explore authentication and authorization, implementing page-level and record-level control
• Use DBIC for easy handling of data
• Add a REST API to allow other applications to access your application
• Add AJAX interactivity to your application
• Incorporate RSS feeds in your application
• Automate testing and learn "Test-Driven Development"
• Mix a procedural interface with a relational DBIx::Class interface
• Write a database interface without DBIx::Class
• Build a custom Model without using any database

Approach

The book is written in an exploratory style: try something and then understand how it works. It will guide you through the features of Catalyst using real-world examples and systematic code snippets.

Who this book is written for

If you are a Perl Developer and want to strengthen your skill by understanding Web Application development using MVC principles, then this book is for you.