[Catalyst] Catalyst Documentation

[Perrin Harkins]

On Wed, 2006-05-31 at 07:47 +1000, Kieren Diment wrote:

> Mason is a templating system with a few application-development type
> features included. Catalyst is a full blown application development
> environment.  Mason makes a serviceable Catalyst View, although I
> perfer Template Toolkit for a couple of reasons.

I think you're exaggerating the differences here.  Although they go
about it in totally different ways, Mason and Catalyst offer very
similar functionality.  For example:

- Flexible ways to map URIs to code.
- Uniform API for access to request data and passing parameters.
- Abstraction of runtime environment so that mod_perl, CGI, and FastCGI
all work the same.
- Error handling with helpful debug screens.
- Plugins for sessions and other extras.

You could say that Mason has MORE ground to cover in the docs, since it
actually includes a templating system and a cache, while Catalyst just
provides glue code.  (The cache is provided by Cache::Cache, but is
covered nicely in the Mason docs.)

My point is not to belittle Catalyst, but rather to say that Mason is a
good example of a complex Perl project with very readable docs, and it's
worth looking at.  The quality of documentation was one of the things
that set Mason apart from the very beginning, and I think it was a key
reason for Mason's success.  It came with guides for developers and
administrators and had a more professional feel to it than most of the
other tools at that time.

- Perrin