Charles Engelke's Blog

My last tutorial session is on Catalyst, a Perl MVC web framework, given by Matt Trout.  I’ve bought a book on Catalyst, but haven’t yet read it.  As a Perl programmer I’d normally be extremely excited about using Catalyst, but I’m pretty well sure that Ruby on Rails will fit my next few projects better.  And Ruby on Rails is just such an active technology, growing by leaps and bounds, that there’s an enormous set of resources available for it.  So this talk should be interesting for me, but its usefulness is likely to be seeing concepts I’ll apply elsewhere instead of directly learning Catalyst.

Catalyst leverages lots of tools already on CPAN instead of being one big tightly coupled environment.  It’s MVC by default, but doesn’t have to be.

The approach given in this talk is interesting.  It’s the exact opposite of how introductory Ruby on Rails talks usually go.  We’re jumping right to low-level internals, instead of starting with the proverbial “view from 10,000 feet”.  We’re seeing a lot of Perl code that uses Catalyst modules, and he’s moving very, very quickly.

I’m already lost, and I know Perl well.  I guess if I want to know about Catalyst I’m going to have to read that book, after all!  I’m following the details, but have no idea how to string them together.  I’ll be slipping out of this talk at the break, unless there’s a huge change soon.  The room is packed; there’s a lot of interest in the subject, but I doubt people are getting what they hoped from the talk.

At least I found three of my four tutorials to be pretty good this year.