Good morning all,

We've finalized the list of goals for the new Catalyst development cycle and am pleased to announce the tasks are ready for any and all who wish to participate. Here's the final list:

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/explore/latest/tag/hamburg

We've tried to put together a target list with a decent mix of tasks, from simple to intermediate and with various use cases, some code refactoring, and some cool new features. In additional, we've tried to detail out tasks with as much guidance and thought as possible, so this should make it easier for people to join in the fun. Here's a quick summary of the tasks, but please see the questhub link for more details:

Makefile.PL dependencies need updating

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51dece1605581e3520000008

mst pointed out there's at least one dependency in the Makefile.PL that needs updating to be compatible with perl 5.18+ It would be great if someone could also do a quick check of the others to make sure there are no others that need changing as well. The Makefile.PL is pretty old and there's a lot of very old versions listed there. I don't want to break anyones deployment, but I'd love for someone to take charge of figuring out what the actual realistic minimum versions for stuff would be.

Support other common body types in request

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d716aa4de22b0a7c00005b

Its 2013. Catalyst should have native support for at least incoming JSON!

PSGI Middleware

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d714894de22b0d7c00004a

Even though we made Plack the underlying engine for Catalyst, its not really amazingly exposed and integrated into Catalyst proper. I'd like to see Plack become more first class in Catalyst.

$c->config->{name} should has a sensible default

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d7146f4de22b0a7c000057

A nice slow ball for someone who just wants to get started

Alternative method for accessing request parameters.

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d7142b4de22b097c000049

Every company I work for has a local way to solve some serious issues catalyst has with the way it parses parameters. Lets have an option to fix it

Make sure the entire test suite passes under 'parse_on_demand'

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d713bf4de22b097c000047

Right now Catalyst parses the full incoming body post before invoking your actions. Ideally we'd someday allow non-blocking - streaming parsing of huge incoming posts. As a step to getting there lets make sure the test suite as it stands would pass if we defer POST parsing until its asked for.

Fix ModPerl Support

http://questhub.io/realm/perl/quest/51d712424de22b0c7c000041

When we did the PSGI integration we failed to properly support everything the old mod_perl handler did. Lets fix that, and take the opportunity to refactor a bit and extract that engine specific stuff into stand alone code.

If you see a task you want to work on, but feel confused, please just go ahead and comment on it. Or if you just have thoughts about it, just go ahead and comment that as well! #catalyst-dev on IRC (irc.perl.org) is also a great place to come talk and get help getting started.

As always, contributions don't have to be limited to items on this list. Got a bug with Catalyst you have a patch for? Great, bring it along. Documentation improvements are also always welcomed.

Catalyst is developed on roughly a two month cycle, which means we expect the new version of Catalyst to launch sometime in late September 2013. One thing that we will do differently from previous development cycles is that we will release more development distributions to CPAN, so that new stuff gets into the wild faster, we get cpan testers at it, and of course you are free to play with some new cool things (just as always the development team reserves the right to change stuff up til the final code, so please don't use something marked DEV in PROD unless you are willing to accept all the risks entailed with that.

You can contribute code via the canonical repository on shadowgit, or via the Github Catalyst Organization:

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

http://git.shadowcat.co.uk/gitweb/gitweb.cgi?p=catagits/Catalyst-Runtime.git

Thanks!John