Introduction to Advent 2014 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 2014!

Here's a brief rundown of some of the stuff that was added and changed in Catalyst in 2014. This is just the highlights, you should checkout the Changes file for more details:

https://metacpan.org/changes/distribution/Catalyst-Runtime

Also note this list highlights new and interesting features, not bugfixes!

Filehandle Body responses

Previously when you set a filehandle like body response, during body finalization we'd manually 'unroll' the filehandle and using the Plack streaming interface. This happened at the Catalyst level. Now we pass the filehandle directly down to your choose Plack handler. This means we can take advantage of optimizations at the server level (such as using a non blocking response when using a server like Twiggy). It also means that you can use middleware like Plack::Middleware::XSendfile and if your filehandle supports a method ->path (see IO::File::WithPath for example) you can allow the webserver to directly server the static file, which is likely to be a significant performance improvement. This use case is for when you want to server static assests but you want to use Catalyst first to do things like check authorization or perform some logging.

This also means if your service supports chunked encoding you will now probably stream the file in chunks, so that your client can start to load and render pages.

Please note that this change meant that we needed to adopt the PSGI standard for filehandle like objects, which is to have a method 'getline' or be a glob. Catalyst allowed for a 'read' method. For now if your filehandle does 'read' but not getline, we continue to manually unroll the filehandle and none of the above goodies will work as expected. We have some middleware Plack::Middleware::AdaptFilehandleRead to assist in this migration but that has not been integrated into Catalyst yet.

Scalar Body responses

If the body response is a scalar we now directly return it to your underlying plack server. Previously we used the streaming interface. This should be somewhat better optimized.

Moved some Catalyst Internal code to Middleware layer

The following middleware is now taking the place of once custom Catalyst code: Plack::Middleware::ContentLength, Plack::Middleware::ContentLength, Plack::Middleware::Head, Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions, Plack::Middleware::FixMissingBodyInRedirect, Plack::Middleware::MethodOverride, Plack::Middleware::RemoveRedundantBody.

Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions

If you throw an exception in your Catalyst application tht conforms to the Plack::Middleware::HTTPExceptions interface, we then escape Catalyst and allow that exception to define the response. Handy for when you want an easy way to return exception responses.

Utilities for localize the PSI $env

Since you can now more easily mount other PSGI applications as the response, we added some utilities to help localize $env under your controller and/or action namespace. This makes it easier to properly service the URL you are targeting.

Stash is now Middleware

We moved $c->stash to middleware. This makes it easier to integrate other applications under your Catalyst application. For example you can mount another Catalyst application under a controller and share the stash.

We also have a big upcoming development release where wer expect big fixes to UTF8 support and some additional features upgrades to the dispatcher to allow you a bit more flexibility in how your routes are put together.

2014 continued to be a growth year for Catalyst features and enhancements. We continue to lay the groundwork needed in order to make even bigger upgrades down the road. All that is missing is your contributions!

CPAN: Catalyst

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

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

Issues: https://github.com/perl-catalyst/catalyst-runtime/milestones/holland

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

John Napiorkowski jjnapiork@cpan.org