Dev411 Blog

A new major version of the Catalyst framework has just been released. Read about it on Digg; here are the latest results I've seen:

It actually got to 91 diggs at the top of the Digg homepage before a new article came along (I took screen shots in KDE too but the layout wasn't as nice as XP). From Jezmo's Digg comment, I learned that SomethingAwful (6th largest forum on the Internet) is using Catalyst to build Titan, a schema-compatible vBulletin replacement. Catalyst is also used by Dresdner Bank, IUseThis and EditGrid.

Marcus has an announcement on his blog and the change log is available, but I'll summarize the changes here:

• "ActionClass templates" which allow you to make extensible actions. The first of which is Catalyst::Action::RenderView, a more flexible replacement for the DefaultEnd plugin. Read more about this in Catalyst::Manual::Actions.
• "Chained actions" which allow you to have parent and child actions on a uri. For example in a uri like /page/43/revision/23/edit you could have one action handle /page/43 and another handle revision/23/edit with captures for 43, 23 and edit.

• Major documentation improvements including the Tutorial and Introduction parts of the Catalyst manual, reference API documentation and the Cookbook.
• More concise log info and new colors for the debug screen.
• Switch from Module::Pluggable::Fast to Module::Pluggable for more fine grain control over setup_components.

• The Catalyst distribution has been split into Catalyst::Runtime and Catalyst::Devel. Runtime contains the minimal parts for deployment while Devel includes helpers and tools. Thankfully install Catalyst in CPAN will install Catalyst::Runtime and there's no need to change the use Catalyst; lines in your App Classes.

• Catalyst::Engine::Apache FIRSTKEY error: I just upgraded from Catalyst 5.6902 and Catalyst::Engine::Apache 1.06. I didn't have a problem running 5.6902 and 1.06 but others had the generic problem below and previously upgraded to 1.07. The problem only appeared with 5.7000 and 1.06 for me. In any event, make sure you're running Catalyst::Engine::Apache 1.07.

  [error] Caught exception in engine "Can't locate
    object method "FIRSTKEY" via package "APR::Table" at
    /path/to/site_perl/5.8.7/Catalyst/Engine/Apache.pm 
    line 65."