Catalyst (software)

Catalyst (software)

Catalyst is an open source web application framework written in Perl, that closely follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architecture, and supports a number of experimental web patterns. It is written using Moose, a modern object system for Perl. Its design is heavily inspired by such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, Maypole, and Spring.

A web application developer would use Catalyst to deal with code common to all web applications: it provides interfaces to web servers and receiving page requests, dispatching these into developer-written code to process and return the requests, and provides a standardised interface for data models, authentication, session management and other common web application elements.

All of these elements are implemented as plugins to a set of common interfaces, allowing the developer to change the specific method used (e.g. a session storing in shared memory versus as a database table, or using FastCGI versus operating as an within Apache's mod_perl) by changing the configuration of Catalyst to use a different plugin without altering the application code.

Catalyst is primarily distributed through the CPAN, which is the official distribution channel for Perl libraries and applications.