Introduction to Advent 2013 and a review of all the things we accomplished.

Its that time once again where the Perl hackers and stakeholders of various projects come together to congratulates themselves a bit for all the time and effort spent over the past year. So we review a bit, and we try to share our knowledge with people that are seeking to learn it. And we have a bit of fun at the same time!

We need to remember that this is a time of year which is traditionally associated with giving gifts and receiving them graciously. But in a larger sense the gifts have already been sent along. Because for those of us involved in Free / Open source software, every act of participation is a gift. Whether you write code, fix documentation, submit test reports or just advocate on twitter, blogs, or whatever, you are gifting time and effort. That's in my mind one of the top gifts a person can give, since our time is one of our most precious and limited resources. To give that away is a pretty big deal in my book. And for those who choose Free / Open source, well I think its very cool to be part of a ethical movement like this whose focus is the betterment of all by working in common for those things with are common to all. Things like Perl, PSGI, Moose and of course lets not forget Catalyst!

So lets take a brief spin through the main events for Catalyst in 2013!

Here's a brief rundown of some of the stuff that was added and changed in Catalyst in 2013. This is just the highlights, you should checkout the Changes file for more details:

https://metacpan.org/source/JJNAPIORK/Catalyst-Runtime-5.90051/Changes

HTTP Method Matching

We added new action attributes that let you constrain on the expected HTTP method. For example:

    sub start : ChainedParent
      PathPrefix CaptureArgs(0) { }

      sub list_users : Chained('start')
       GET PathPart('') Args(0) { }

      sub add_users : Chained('start')
       POST PathPart('') Args(0) { }

See GET in Catalyst::Controller for more.

Unicode in Core

Just turn on the switch and you'll be sure to have greatly improved ability to handle utf8 encoding.

    $c->config->{encoding} = 'UTF-8'

Handle the PSGI writer object for more control on output

Useful for streaming and working with event loops, or just for when you want more control on how content is returned.

Support for accessing IO streams when allowed.

Use this for when you want to do websockets or long polling.

Support PSGI middleware in configuration

Lets you declare middleware as part of your Catalyst application

Added 'global data handlers' for parsing request content

Lets you handle more than classic form POST parameters. Yes, this mean Catalyst now handlers JSON POST out of the box!

Mount a PSGI response

Now your actions can mount PSGI applications and return PSGI reponses directly. Great for when you want to graft into you Catalyst application bits of other frameworks such as Web::Simple or Web::Machine (or even other Catalyst applications.)

Constrain Actions on HTTP Request Content-Type

Lets you constrain an action to a particular HTTP request content type. This lets you have one action that handles form data and another that handles JSON. Useful for building web APIs and is a nice augmentation of what you get with Catalyst::Action::REST

Configuration flag to use Hash::MultiValue for Request Parameters

Lets you use Hash::MultiValue for query and body parameters, which can solve some situtations when you are not sure if incoming parameters are scalar or arrays. Very commonly used on other Plack based systems.

And there was a lot of under the hood stuff as well. We cleared out that nasty Regexp based dispatch stuff into its own repo (makes it easier to remove later on). We did a bunch of stuff to make sure we'd play nice with other Plack applications that Catalyst might dispatch to (such as making sure input is properly buffered). Ether (who works with me at Campus Explorer) dug in deep and cleaned up some old and no longer good practice Moosisms (replacing them with new, shiny Moosey goodness). And quite a few people checked in docs and other improvements.

Here's a nice chart of people that checked in code to the Catalyst repo:

https://github.com/perl-catalyst/catalyst-runtime/graphs/contributors?from=2013-01-01&to=2013-11-16&type=c

And that doesn't count people that checked in code to other important bits of the ecosystem. Lots of people contributed doc patches and fixes to stuff around the session and authentication as well. So '++' to all of you!

Excited to learn more? Well, go check out the docs, ponder test cases and look forward to more upcoming advent articles where we hope to cover all this and more!

In order to facilitate more participation, we mirrored the main Catalyst git repository over on Github (see: https://github.com/perl-catalyst/). This repository mirrors the canonical repository which for the time being will remain on shadowgit (catagits@git.shadowcat.co.uk:Catalyst-Runtime.git). And we setup TravisCI on the github repo in order to help us track problems with changes (thanks Chris Weyl https://metacpan.org/author/RSRCHBOY for the help with that).

In addition we setup a Questhub for helping us to track and discuss possible changes to Catalyst (See http://questhub.io/realm/perl/explore/latest/tag/catalyst)

I've also tried to blog as much as possible, and be sure to announce the important bits on the mailing list and in many cases I've tried to make use of external sites like Reddit and social media.

Lastly we tried to be a little more transparent regarding what we are targeting for Catalyst changes. We had several named development cycles ( Zombie-boomstick, Sicilian-buttercup and Hamburg) which all had targeted goals, announcements, as much discussion as I could squeeze out of the community and retrospectives.

I personally believe that open source works best when it works for all of us and the best way I can think to do that is to try and make everything as transparent as possible. I believe we succeeded in that, and I hope we can build on that into the coming year.

2013 was another big year for Catalyst. We worked hard at making it even more flexible and useful out of the box by exposing more PSGI and grafting in a few missing bits. I expect 2014 to be even a bigger year as we look hard at Catalyst and try to find a strong direction that lets it remain the best full stack web application framework for Perl!

CPAN: Catalyst

Github: https://github.com/perl-catalyst/

Code Repository: catagits@git.shadowcat.co.uk:Catalyst-Runtime.git

Questhub: http://questhub.io/realm/perl/explore/latest/tag/catalyst

Mailing List Info: http://lists.scsys.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/catalyst

John Napiorkowski jjnapiork@cpan.org