[Catalyst] some basic Catalyst theory questions

[Perrin Harkins]

On Mon, 2005-06-06 at 23:11 +0200, Sebastian Riedel wrote:
> Next to the context you get an eval cage around your method call with  
> profiling.

Is there a concept for how exceptions should be handled in Catalyst?  My
usual approach is that I have one eval{} at the top level and never try
to catch anything below that unless I think I can do something useful to
recover from it.

> I tend to use this little idiom...
> 
>      use YAML 'LoadFile';
>      use Path::Class 'file';
> 
>      MyApp->config(
>          LoadFile( file( MyApp->config->{home}, 'myapp.yml' ) ) );

That looks good.  Some kind of config plugin and some mention in the
docs would be nice, but I'm glad to see it's that easy.

> Funny, everybody thinks it's much more flexible than everything else  
> on the market.
> And keep in mind that mod_rewrite is very platform specific, we  
> support CGI, all versions of mod_perl, FastCGI, SpeedyCGI, Zeus and  
> more!

I just meant that tools like mod_rewrite can fix shortcomings in URL
handling at the app level.

> IMO, having the uri right next to your method (in code) makes the  
> whole mapping dead simple.
> 
> 
>      sub method : Path('/foo/bar') {}

The trouble is, if I want to move your app to /exec/obidos/bar, I need
to edit your source code, don't I?  Other frameworks like
CGI::Application do define an interaction between methods, but they
don't use absolute paths like this.  I suppose there's a way to use
regexes to get around this, but that seems clunky.

> It works with all engines!
> Yes docs are a bit slim, but Christian our machinist :) promised  
> benchmarks and example configs for all platforms...lets hope this  
> post motivates him some more!

That would be good, because it's not very clear how one should set up a
CGI script to trap a whole range of URLs.  I'm guessing it involves
PATH_INFO.

> Most people just prefer using Catalyst::Plugin::FormValidator, so i  
> guess thats why everybody overlooked it. ;)

The docs in C::P::FV are pretty skimpy too, really.  I would never have
guessed I was supposed to use it to read URL args, since that isn't how
it gets used in other systems I've seen.  Most of them still read the
values from CGI or Apache::Request after doing the validation. 

I don't mean to be a pain about the docs.  If I were a Catalyst user at
this point, I'd consider working on them.  Right now though, I'm just
dabbling with it and making toy apps to compare against other systems,
so I'm not at the point where that would make sense yet.

- Perrin