[Catalyst] [Announce] Catalyst 5.7000

[Marcus Ramberg]

The Catalyst Core Team is proud to announce that we've just shipped the next
major release of the Catalyst framework, version 5.7000. This release is the
result of the helpful contributions of a large number of people, both on the
documentation and people submitting patches and ideas for improvements. We
would like to use this opportunity to thank them for their great work.
Catalyst would be much worse of without you guys. Hope you will continue to
make us great.

One major focus in this release has been improving the Tutorial and
Introduction parts of the Catalyst manual, as well as a complete review of
the reference API documentation and the Cookbook. While we acknowledge that
there is still much to be done, we hope this release will make it easier for
new users to learn and enjoy Catalyst.

Another major feature in this release is the new ActionClass templates,
which allow you to make pre-made actions that can be extended and customized
through a simple API. Catalyst::Action::RenderView is the first of these
ActionClasses, but we hope to see many more follow on CPAN. RenderView is a
reimplementation of the DefaultEnd plugin, and is now used by default in
applications generated by catalyst.pl.

While on the subject of generated code, we've also done a review of the rest
of the code catalyst.pl creates, and we believe the updated version will
allow you to build your new  applications even quicker. We've also changed
all log output to be more concise and readable. The debug screen has also
had a makeover. A new color scheme and Data::Dump generated debug output
will hopefully make this more readable and useful. You can read more about
actionclasses in Catalyst::Manual::Actions.

Simon Elliot, Matt S Trout and Robert Sedlacek has been hard at work to
implement a new dispatch mechanism we call chained actions. This means that
you can dispatch to a url like /page/43/revision/23/edit, and it will be
passed along a chain to handle each element in the url, with an optional
number of 'Captures'. In this example, you could have a page action with 1
capture, chained to a revision action with 1 capture, and a edit action with
no arguments. You can read more about this in the updated Introduction.

The last major change I am going to mention is related to distribution. We
understand that Catalyst has a large number of dependencies, and that it can
be hard to deploy your applications to production. That's why we have split
the Catalyst distribution into a Runtime and Devel part. This is a cleaner
design overall, and means your application only needs to install what it
needs to run on the servers. For instance you no longer need to install
Template Toolkit on your servers if you use HTML::Mason or another Catalyst
View. This also makes it much more viable to make your own helper packages
to generate your preferred code style. Catalyst is still a part of the
Catalyst-Runtime distribution, so you can still install it with perl -MCPAN
-e'install Catalyst'. Module authors are encouraged to depend on
Catalyst::Runtime rather than the Catalyst module from now on, but both will
work.

The Devel and Runtime distributions will be on a CPAN mirror near you before
long, but until then you have the option of getting them here:

http://dev.thefeed.no/stuff/Catalyst-Devel-1.00.tar.gz
http://dev.thefeed.no/stuff/Catalyst-Runtime-5.7000.tar.gz

You can also find a complete changelog here:

http://dev.thefeed.no/stuff/Catalyst-Runtime-5.7000.tar.gz

Thank you for your attention.

-- 
On behalf of the Catalyst Core Team
Catalyst Release Manager
Marcus Ramberg
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