How Catalyst Happens

What happened this year?

Well...wow. Advent time already again. That means another year almost over. And what a year it's been. In April of this year, we shipped Catalyst 5.80 - the first Catalyst to use Moose from the ground up. It was a straight port, with minimal additional features - and we did that for a reason. The reason was that 5.80 allowed us to shake out the compatibility issues resulting from a complete change of object systems. Change One Thing At Once, as the adage goes - and many thanks to Guillermo Roditi aka "groditi" and Scott McWhirter aka "konobi" for doing the slogging to get a first ported version up we could start beating on and clean up for release. We did this in the hope that rather than needing to add features to the core to take advantage of Moose, the Catalyst community would step up and figure it out in the wider world so we could try and fail a few times to find the best path without committing ourselves to maintaining compatibility with the bad ideas. Frankly, I'd say the plan succeeded beyond our wildest expectations.

What modules are worth a (re-)look?

Catalyst::Model::DBIC::Schema has been rewritten using a traits system to enable plugins to be written and loaded for it easily, and is once again a shining example of best practices for model adaptor authoring (many thanks to Rafael Kitover aka "Caelum" for doing the heavy lifting - and for putting up with my nitpicking during the process). CatalystX::RoleApplicator allows us to add roles elegantly to the application, request, response, engine, dispatcher, and stats classes in use, eliminating the need to construct near-empty classes in order to compose together additional functionality. Better still, RoleApplicator is implemented using MooseX::RelatedClassRoles, so you can use the same interface when you hit similar problems in your own code (many thanks to Hans Dieter Pearcey aka "confound" for writing both). Catalyst::Controller::ActionRole provides the :Does attribute which applies roles to your action class rather than setting it ala :ActionClass - far cleaner, and as with RoleApplicator, allows multiple behaviours to be used at once (merci to both confound, and to Florian Ragwitz aka "rafl" for this one). Given that, we can now implement things such as Catalyst::ActionRole::ACL, which provides declarative role-based authorization for actions (kudos to David Wollmann aka "converter" for this one). This can be combined onto the same action with other similar modules, such as Catalyst::ActionRole::NeedsLogin from CatalystX::SimpleLogin, so that un-logged-in users are redirected to the login page, and logged-in users are restricted unless they have correct permissions - all on a single controller method. CatalystX::SimpleLogin also illustrates that we're now able to supply actions from controller roles (and method modifiers to existing actions) - for example CatalystX::SimpleLogin::TraitFor::Controller::Login::Logout adds a logout action to your controller (SimpleLogin was created by a number of evil geniuses - see the docs for the full list). This is possible because of work done on MooseX::MethodAttributes by rafl and Tomas Doran aka "t0m", with assorted help, kibitzing, and occasional laughter from the Moose community. I should probably also mention HTML::FormHandler, from Gerda Shank aka "gshank", which seems to be rapidly gaining in popularity. It's aiming at a different problem definition to HTML::FormFu, but given its wide adoption perhaps it's aiming for a better problem definition; I am grumpy and cynical about form handling so choose not to express an opinion. But HTML::FormHandler is a great example of the same, growing, trend as MooseX::RelatedClassRoles - non-Catalyst-dependent modules being written with Moose as the lingua franca, and then thin glue to integrate them into Catalyst (or in the case of FormHandler, no glue required at all :).

The point

See how every single module I've mentioned introduces at least one new name? That. Is How Catalyst Happens. Catalyst has always been a project of the community, driven by the community. I first got involved by turning up on the #catalyst channel on irc.perl.org and starting trying to figure out how to use Catalyst. Given that I was already planning to abuse it as well, I was reading the source and happened to notice a potential bug in the regexp dispatch system; when I flagged this to the channel somebody immediately offered to audit and apply a patch for it if I could come up with one. Seeing as it was a simple fix, I whipped it up, presented it, and was told "what about tests?" and pointed at which test to add to in order to prove that the fix worked. So I did, and it did, and the patch was applied. And I was addicted. Not long after that I volunteered to run the source repositories (and later Shadowcat ended up hosting the entire project infrastructure, but that's another story involving a grinch of an ISP and a Christmas eve migration :) ), and as other people became addicted, I had the unmitigated pleasure of handing out commit bit after commit bit - and in more recent times arranging for the handing out of co-maint bit after co-maint bit as release managers for different related projects shift around. I'm entry 18 in the Catalyst svnpasswd file. As of today it's 275 contributors long. A client manager once listened to me rave about this community, and told me that utopias never lasted. Perhaps he was right. Catalyst isn't that; it's an anarchy, a meritocracy, an oligarchy, and a dictatorship, in equal measure and without contradiction. When a member of the community moves on to other projects, two more step up to take his place; active contributors ebb, flow, and eddy as people's work lives and real lives intersect and interact with itches to be scratched. Even for core this is true - t0m now acts as the 5.80 chainsaw delegate and keeper of todo lists; rafl has stepped up to split the dist building work with Marcus Ramberg, our long-standing release manager; Kieren Diment aka "kd" replaced Jesse Sheidlower aka "the_jester" as docs co-ordinator after Real Life happened to the_jester (well, that and writing http://www.amazon.com/F-Word-Jesse-Sheidlower/dp/0195393112, of which I of course heartily approve :). Speaking of documentation, the Catalyst (and for that matter DBIx::Class) project has always had a spirit of treating documenters as at least as important as implementors - the record of contributions does not record who's who, or who was what for which project, and that's correct. The words to make a piece of code comprehensible are as essential to that piece of code being successfully used as the Perl source is. So how does Catalyst happen? It happens because of you, the other users (I can't say "our" users, since we're users too). When you report problems, when you discuss things on mailing lists, and especially when you cross the line to contributor by editing the wiki or patching some POD or sending a test or even implementing a feature or fixing a bug. And if you want to try to contribute something but can't think of what, well, for this month only we could really rather do with... Advent Calendar articles :) - so please, please mail the Advent Calendar co-ordinator Bogdan Lucaciu aka "zamolxes" at bogdan at sinapticode.com if you fancy having a go, and if you can't think of a topic then try picking one of the modules I mention above and writing about that!

A look forward to 2010

Best of all, next year, it's going to keep happening. Devin Austin aka "dhoss" has almost finished the complete rewrite of the helper and script system he started as a Google Summer of Code minion, Zbigniew Lukasiak aka "zby" has an almost complete branch splitting the application and per-request context objects which will enable a whole bunch more awesome things, and miyagawa's Catalyst::Engine::PSGI lets us take advantage of Plack - which I fully expect to take the Perl web world by storm in the next year. I might even manage to figure out how some of the things I've been experimenting with in Web::Simple apply to improving the state of the art rather than just sitting around talking design with people and writing waffling articles. 2009 ruled. 2010 is going to rule even more. So stick right with us and let's show you the former, and maybe even give you some ideas on helping make the latter a reality. Because this is going to be the coolest Catalyst Advent Calendar so far. Oh, and Merry F***ing Christmas! -- mst, out

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