You may have noticed that the Advent Calendar has more holes in it than previous years. That's because we're too busy running the Internet to write extra documentation. But Catalyst's documentation is stable, excellent and like the rest of Catalyst, mostly keeps out of your way until you need it.

In 2005 SRI, Catalyst's originator edited the Catalyst advent calendar. From 2006, I (ZARQUON on CPAN or kd on IRC) took over the reins. In 2010 DHOSS took over from me. That's 6 years, with 24 articles each December, and volunteers writing each article. That's 144 articles (less the few we missed) all nicely planned in advance and edited. As you can see, that's a lot of work. There's no longer time, or enough stuff to write about for that to be able to continue. As a result we're retiring the Catalyst Advent Calendar from today. The Catalyst Advent Calendar was inspired by the Perl Advent Calendar, and both of these together have gone on to inspire other documentation sprints in the Perl community, and elsewhere. Documentation sprints are a great idea, and we encourage them. However, Catalyst no longer needs one.

If Catalyst were a web framework that enforced its developer's decisions on its end users, that would be fine, we could write about the latest way that our framework forces you to do things ad infinitum. But that's not the way we work. What Catalyst excels at is allowing you to bolt the logic of your business into a web application while ignoring the web for as long as possible.

What if your business is a government department focused on collecting data, with hundreds of years of legacy procedures? Well, Catalyst can help you cope with that requirement.

What if your business is a transportation company, responsible for booking, scheduling and delivering millions of people from, and to their destinations, reliably, with as close to zero downtime as possible? Let's make it interesting, let's add freight into the mix. How can we integrate our legacy systems into a modern web interface? Well one of the quickest, easiest, and most reliable ways of doing that is with Catalyst.

What if your business is a telecoms and networking company who need to integrate existing hardware and software infrastructure into a web application? Let's make life more interesting - let's say that some of the hardware is physical and some of the hardware is virtual. Catalyst stays out of your way so that the experts can concentrate on their expertise, and can treat the web programming side of the requirements almost as an afterthought.

Content distribution networks (think big)? Archival systems (with optional legacy technical debt)? Internet security? Academic research at both the big end of town (i.e. bioinformatics), and the small (e.g. the weird data models required for social science research)? Yes indeed, no problems. Catalyst will help you to accomplish all of this easily, as it stays out of your way until you need web functionality.

Why is this section short on technical detail? Three words: Non Disclosure Agreements: an unfortunately common piece of security theatre in the IT industry. Please email the author if you need more details (to the best of their ability etc. etc.).

Perl was built from the ground up to help computers to deal with the horrible combination of technological and social complexity. And, thanks to Larry Wall and his collaborators, this was accomplished to the extent that Perl facilitated the initial Internet explosion (both Web and networking infrastructure) in the mid to late 1990s. CPAN (the largest, best tested, open source repository of programmers libraries in existence) is the vehicle that accomplishes this. Catalyst is stable, backwards compatible, mature, well documented and designed to integrate with CPAN at the most fundamental level.

Because Catalyst stays out of your way until you nead it, almost all of the serious problems you will face are business logic problems. Another way of putting this is that if you know CPAN, and you have read Catalyst::Manual::Tutorial, and you know how to integrate your own expertise into something that looks like a CPAN module (or you know someone who can reliably do that for you), then you're ready to make the business decision to use Catalyst.

If you've been paying attention, you know that for almost all of this decision making process you can ignore the World Wide Web, and Catalyst will make it easy to integrate your business logic into a web application at the last minute.

Well we're retiring the Catalyst Advent Calendar after 2011, and instead of trying to write one article on Catalyst per day in December in 2012, we (as in the community) are going to try to write one article per month on Catalyst through 2012 and beyond. This doesn't mean that Catalyst is dying - This means that Catalyst is running the show.

Kieren Diment <zarquon@cpan.org>