<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Second, are there "success stories" for Catalyst that one can point to<br>to demonstrate it's scalability and flexibility?
<br><br></blockquote></div><br>
I do all the tech stuff for what is currently the seventh largest
discussion forums according to <a href="http://www.big-boards.com">http://www.big-boards.com</a>. We host
over 30,000,000 posts served by a cluster of nine servers that push
about 80mbit a day total. This is all sadly on PHP right now, and
I am in the process of writing new software (called Titan) to replace
it. It is entirely based on Catalyst and ab benchmarks of my
development code are running well over 20X faster than the PHP
equivalent. When this is complete, I hope to have one of the
largest Catalyst-driven sites to date.<br>
<br>
If you plan to use Catalyst with mod_perl, there's plenty of data out
there to prove its scalability. I can't speak on Ruby's
performance in high-traffic web environments, but I'm waiting to see
more people using it before I'll take it seriously in that
regard. Hopefully this happens.<br>
<br>
Catalyst is extremely flexible. Basically I am using Catalyst for
its controller; I use NONE of the provided model, view, or plugin
classes at all. Catalyst doesn't care. You can also
override most parts of the engine (I built custom session and user
authentication in, and rehauled the error handling entirely). All
this has let me keep things as fast as possible, and if I ever need to
break away from Catalyst, it's not so painful.<br>
<br>
How efficient your application will be is up to you - there's lots of
"would-be-useful" things on CPAN, but ALWAYS look at the source and
make sure you aren't better off rolling your own.<br>
<br>
My advice would be to at least devote some time to learning Catalyst -
you'll soon fall in love with it. For me, it's an escape from a
long PHP nightmare, so it's been especially wonderful. :)<br>